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Lovecraft Historical Context Four 2013
Lovecraft Historical Context Four 2013
Lovecraft Historical Context Four 2013
LOVECRAFT IN
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
the fourth collection of essays and notes
by David Haden
2013
CONTENTS
PART ONE: General essays
1. Typhon as a source for Cthulhu.
2. Arthur Leeds : the early biography, photographic portraits, and a story
3. The terribly nice old ladies : Miniter and Beebe at Wilbraham.
4. A source for Rev. Abijah Hoadley in The Dunwich Horror.
5. An unknown H.P. Lovecraft correspondent?
6. Shards from H.P. Lovecrafts quarry.
7. Of Rats and Legions : H.P. Lovecraft in Northumbria.
8. Looking into the Shining Trapezohedron.
9. Notes made after reading R.E. Howards key Lovecraftian stories.
10. H.P. Lovecrafts cinema ticket booth job, circa 1930.
11. Garrett P. Serviss (18511929) : a major influence on H.P. Lovecraft
12. John Howard Appleton (18441930).
13. Tsan-Chan in Tibet : Tibetan Bon devils and Lovecrafts future empire.
14. The locations of Sonias two hat shops.
15. In the hollows of memory : H.P. Lovecrafts Seekonk and Cat Swamp.
16. A note on The Paxton.
17. Rabid! A note on H.P. Lovecraft and the disease rabies.
18. Pictures of some members of the Providence Amateur Press Club.
19. H.P. Lovecraft and his Young Mens Club.
20. A few additions for Anna Helen Crofts (1889-1975).
21. An annotated The History of the Necronomicon.
PART ONE
From the thighs upwards his parts formed a huge manly mass, so as to
raise him above all the mountains; many times did his head approximate the
stars; hands too he had, one verging upon the west, and another on the east;
and from these stood forth a hundred dragon heads. But the parts from the
thighs down had serpentine windings to an immense degree, whose trails,
stretching to the very summit, emitted much rumbling; all his body was
furnished with wings; the tangled covering of his head and jaws was shaken
by the wind; and fire darted from his eyes. A being of such nature was
Typhaon... 1
his essay presents evidence for the idea that the primordial
Ancient Greek monster Typhon, also known as Typhaon,2
was one possible source for the visual size and some of key
Harry M. Hine (in Science and Mathematics in Ancient Greek Culture, Oxford University Press,
2002, p.59) draws on earlier scholarship to suggest that the Greek Typhon myth came from the
East. In 1989 Neil Forsyth (The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, Princeton University Press,
p.67) suggested the Typhon story as possibly arising from a storytellers amalgamation of the
Babylonian Tiamat (a monstrous primordial sea-goddess) and the Hurrian-Hittite Ullikummi (a
giant stone mountain-monster, fathered like Typhon to defeat the Gods). I am informed that this
same thought had, however, already occurred to many German scholars in the 1930s such as
Schmidt, Dorsieff, and Guterbock and was later presented in English by Burkert some years
before Forsyth.
3
The idea of a Semitic linguistic origin for the name Typhon is also noted by modern
scholarship the very name of Typhon might have a Semitic origin. It has hypothetically but
7
H.P. Lovecraft could read Latin from age eight and could read it fluently.4
He had read deeply in classical sources in his youth and early manhood,
albeit seemingly mostly in English translation. In the years directly before he
wrote The Call of Cthulhu (1926) he continued to have a deep interest in
classical antiquity, especially the monstrous and mysterious aspects of the
myth and art of Ancient Egypt and Imperial Rome. In those same years he
was part of a circle of intellectual men some of whom were quite well versed
in the Greek classics, such as his close friend Samuel Loveman. He also had
easy access to the major public libraries and museums of New York City, and
even when in Providence and Boston he had access to high-quality public
libraries.
I shall now list the various characteristics of Typhon, drawn from a number
of sources, and compare these to Cthulhu:
1. Typhon is of the right size to be directly comparable with Cthulhu: he
is a grisly monster taller than a mountain. His head reached the stars5
and with one hand he touched the east, with the other the west.6 Lovecraft
quite convincingly been associated with the Semitic name Zaphon from Carolina Lopez-Ruiz,
When the Gods Were Born: Greek cosmogonies and the Near East, Harvard University Press, 2010, p.111.
Zaphon (later Zion, on translation from Aramaic to Hebrew) was the name for the Canaanite
version of Olympus, the endlessly high mountain on whose lookouts it was deemed the gods met
or abided and/or where the storm god Baal had his misty palace. See my essay in this volume
Looking into the Shining Trapezohedron for evidence Lovecraft knew of Baal.
Another possibility might be that while the myth came from the east, the name came from
Egypt, from the sphinx-god and master of demons Tutu...
We know, since U. Wilckens article of 1903 that the name Tutu had the Greek
equivalent Tithoes, which was confirmed by W. Spiegelberg in 1929 from Olaf E.
Kaper, The Egyptian God Tutu: A Study of the Sphinx-God and Master of Demons, Peeters,
2003, p.24.
4 S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale, Wildside Press, 2003, p.168. Lovecraft also had a little Greek,
although that was apparently not very good and he read in English translations, some of which
are still held up as classics, such as Chapmans Hymns of Homer. See also S.T. Joshi, Primal Sources,
Hippocampus Press, 2003. p.49.
5
Bells New Pantheon Or Historical Dictionary of the Gods, Demi Gods, Heroes, 1790, p.299.
8
has the dreamers describe Cthulhu as immensely tall, most famously and
distinctively as A mountain walked or stumbled.7 In the dreams
recounted by the sensitive, Cthulhu is said to be in appearance a gigantic
thing that is miles high and which walked or lumbered about.
2. Typhon was depicted as semi-tentacular in aspect, at least in parts. He
was described as having dragons heads on his hands instead of fingers
and coiled serpents for legs.8 Hesiod portrayed Typhon as having 100
dragons heads on his hands.9
10
3. Typhon has scales the scales which covered his body.11 In one
account he appears to have some kind of tangle on his jaws which is not
specified as being hair the tangled covering of his head and jaws was
shaken by the wind.12 On this point, see also the several illustrations which
accompany this essay.
4. Typhon has wings, at least in a 2nd century description of him by
Nicander in which he is also described with wings.13 The popular
account of 1899 which opens this essay also states that all his body was
furnished with wings.14
5. In death he lies buried but alive and seeking escape, like Cthulhu.
According to various sources Typhon was buried or sunken, after defeat by
His thighs and legs were of a serpentine form. Bells New Pantheon or Historical Dictionary of
the Gods, Demi Gods, Heroes, 1790, p.299.
8
Bells New Pantheon or Historical Dictionary of the Gods, Demi Gods, Heroes, 1790, p.299.
10 It should be noted that while he may have been dragon like, Typhon was not actually a
dragon, as is often wrongly stated in a number of modern tourist guidebooks.
11
Bells New Pantheon or Historical Dictionary of the Gods, Demi Gods, Heroes, 1790, p.299.
12 James A. Fitz Simon and Vincent A. Fitz Simon. Gods of Old, and the stories they tell. Fisher
Unwin, 1899. p.441.
13 The Popular Encyclopedia, volume 6 (1841). Also given in The Routledge Handbook of Greek
Mythology (2004).
14 James A. Fitz Simon and Vincent A. Fitz Simon, Gods of Old, and the stories they tell, Fisher
Unwin, 1899. p.441.
One might even see an aspect of the myth of Tartarus used in Lovecrafts At The Mountains
of Madness. I am indebted to the anonymous author of the essay Hell: Into everlasting fire
(The Economist, Xmas issue 2012, 22nd Dec 2012) for this altering passage
The Trojan hero Aeneas in Virgils Aeneid toured Hades [Hell], with difficulty enough,
and [while there] he merely glanced towards Tartarus [the prison of the defeated gods],
glimpsing a high cliff with a castle below it surrounded by a torrent of flame. That
single sighting fixed him to the spot in terror.
This might appear similar to Danforths final backward glance (in which he presumably
glimpses Kadath) at the end of Mountains, a key plot point I explored briefly in a note in my
previous volume of Lovecraft in Historical Context. So far as I can tell, no-one has spotted this
possible source before. It suggests there may be further links between the Aeneid and
Mountains?
17 Apollodorus stated that the Sphinx was one of the offspring of Typhon and Echidna. The
Sphinx was a mythical creature that Lovecraft was always especially interested in, and this
paternity claim obviously persisted into the popular encyclopaedias of Lovecrafts beloved 18th
century...
10
The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] gives the first meaning of wight as strong
and courageous, esp. in warfare Andreia: studies in manliness and courage in classical
antiquity, 2003, p.40.
At around the same time Spenser was writing, the Scottish King James refers to victims of
demonic possession as having a manic strength exceeding six of the wightest and wodest men.
This was Scots dialect meaning strong and savage men, implying warriors. The same meaning of
a warrior occurs in the Scots dialect poem The Bruce. Wicht in Scots dialect thus appears to
have meant active or powerful or sometimes quick, which leads to the English renaissances
written use of wight. The word was not limited to men, at least in the Elizabethan period. For
example: There met he these wight yonge men. (Adam Bel); but also She was a wight, if ever
such wight were (Shakespeare, Desdemona).
Wight may also have had a secondary contextually implied meaning of wizard in Scotland and
Ireland, and possibly elsewhere which would help explain the seemingly supernatural use in
Chaucer: I crouche thee from elves and from wights (Millers Tale). Tolkien used the word for
his modern coinage of barrow-wights for his fiction, although it had already been used in a
similar context in the 19th century by William Morris in his fantasy novel The Roots of the Mountain
(1889): trolls and wood-wights.
The Old Saxon meaning of wiht might also be mentioned, for clarification it survives in the
still-understood saying not a whit, meaning not at all, nothing there, which one might use in
making a verbal report after searching for something in vain. The Saxon wiht appears to have
meant a person or animal (implied, one not worth naming or referring to more fully).
11
have a strong resonance with Cthulhu reaching out to entangle the dreams
of sensitive dreamers around the world in The Call of Cthulhu.19
7. In the Roman world Typhon was associated with volcanic activity...
In other accounts, he is confined [in] volcanic regions, where he is
the cause of eruptions. Typhon is thus the personification of volcanic
forces. 20
Newly formed lands at sea such as those which are key to Lovecrafts
stories of Dagon and The Call of Cthulhu are usually brought to the
seas surface by volcanic action. In The Call of Cthulhu the initial dreams
are accompanied by a slight earthquake tremor. Later there is mention of a
storm and earth tremors that cause the Alert to set sail. Later still, the
narrator learns more fully of the earthquake-born tempest which must
have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled mens dreams.
8. Typhon speaks an unfathomable and monstrously unspeakable
language In all his dreadful heads there were voices that sent forth every
kind of unspeakable sound wrote Hesiod in Theogony. His voice also had
immense reach Whatever his form of utterance, his voice made the
mountains echo.21 Unspeakability is of course at the heart of Lovecrafts
work, although admittedly its use in his work occurs well before the
conception of Cthulhu.22 But note that in the storys dream descriptions,
Cthulhus voice is not quite unspeakable. It is rather called uninscribable
19 Donald R. Burlesons H.P. Lovecraft, a critical study (p.94) also suggests The Faerie Queen as the
possible inspiration from Lovecrafts Shub-Niggurath (The Black Goat of the Woods with a
Thousand Young). He cites a depiction of a monster...Half like a serpent horribly displayed,
But the other half did womans shape retain (clearly this is inspired by Echidna, although implied
to be one of her descendants met in a cave in the medieval period) in The Red-Crossed Knights
encounter with Errour section. Burleson notes the description of this monster as having a
thousand young ones.
20
21
For a detailed study of the exact order in which the idea of the monster in The Call of
Cthulhu came to Lovecraft, see my earlier essay in the book Walking with Cthulhu (2011).
22
12
23
24
Kathryn Stoddard, The Narrative Voice in the Theogony Of Hesiod, BRILL, 2004, p.58.
25
Stephen L. Harris & Gloria Platzner, Classical Mythology: images and insights, Mayfield, 1998,
p.665.
26
27
28 Carolina opez-Ruiz, When the Gods Were Born: Greek cosmogonies and the Near East, Harvard
University Press, 2010, p.111.
29 It should be noted that the ancient understand of the heavens did not involve the vast
distances we now take for granted, but was imagined as if a sort of dome or roof comprising of
various higher and lower layers and interlocking spheres.
30
In his Egyptian (Set) form, in the 18th Century it was understood that... Typhon was the evil
genius, or devil of the Egyptians Encyclopdia Britannica, 1797.
31
32
14
In his reading on Egypt, and in 18th century literature, Lovecraft could thus
have repeatedly encountered the long-standing anti-Semitic tradition which
developed from this conflation, and which actually presented
15
39
40
Russell E. Gmirkin, Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus, T&T Clark, p.282.
Book review in The Modern Review, 1881. The reviewer refers to the chapter The Egyptian
Origin of the Jews Traced From the Monuments.
41
42
are then given of how this tradition runs through to Charles Dickens
in modern English literature.] 43
Typhon in the alchemical Della tramutatione metallica, by Giovanni Battista Nazari, 1589.
17
44 For a complete scholarly discussion of the Typhon stories in relation to the apparently
murderous Typhon cult as the original of the infamous blood libel against the Jews, see Bezalel
Bar-Kochva, The image of the Jews in Greek literature, University of California Press , 2010, p.276-279.
45 Lovecraft had been researching heavily on the historical occult and on superstitions in the
New York libraries, during his extended stay there in the mid 1920s, as he worked on the book
The Cancer of Superstition for Houdini. It should go without saying that he was also an expert on
the use of the occult in fiction.
It should be noted that H.P. Lovecraft mentored a young obviously-Jewish boy face to face
at his home, late in his life. See S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.947.
46
47
In Steven J. Mariconda, The Emergence of Cthulhu, Lovecraft Studies 15 (Fall 1987), p.54.
18
Ra was the Ancient Egyptian sun god, King of the Gods. If Lovecraft were
to have considered how to transform his dream to make it fit for a horror
story, the obvious choice would have been to invert the god by making him
into Set, the Ancient Egyptian god of evil. By this very simple route
Lovecraft could have easily arrived at Set-Typhon as a basis for the central
monster in The Call of Cthulhu, and then read up on the physical nature of
Typhon.
13) What of any further internal evidence in The Call of Cthulhu? It is
notable that at the very height of his story, Lovecraft makes several deliberate
and repeated references to classical antiquity
the titan Thing from the stars [Cthulhu] slavered and gibbered
like Polypheme [who was a blinded Cyclops] cursing the fleeing ship
of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops
hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the
moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of
the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged
mocking imps of Tartarus.
In the latter paragraph we have three elements of Hesiods Typhon story,
albeit co-mingled in a nightmare vision: i) emergence from the underworld
to the reach the heavens, and then a return underground; ii) the elder gods
(whom Typhon is bred to challenge); and iii) the pit of Tartarus.48
To sum up, the classical myth of Typhon presents us with at least five key
and rather plausible elements which match Cthulhu: he is the size of a
mountain, yet can walk; he is scaly and tentacular, at least in significant parts;
he is deemed to be very alien and also utterly evil; he is thought of as cosmic
in nature and also in terms of the scale of his threat; he is buried or
submerged underground yet is still alive and seeking escape. The later
48
49 Lovecraft had The Works of Hesiod in his library at his death. See: S.T. Joshi, Lovecrafts
Library: a catalogue (second edition), Hippocampus Press, 2002, p.79. Also Chapmans version of
The Hymns of Homer. See: S.T. Joshi, Primal Sources, Hippocampus Press, 2003. p.49.
Popular articles on dragons gave more detail on Pigafettes textual observations of the dragons.
An unillustrated article on Dragons, Griffins and Salamanders in Charles Dickenss Household
Words (2nd May 1857, p.428) talks of... Father Pigafette, a great authority in unnatural history,
[who] tells us that In Congo is a kind of dragons like in bignesse to rammes [rams], with wings,
having long tayles and chaps, and divers jawes of teeth of blue and greene colour, painted like
scales, with two feet, and feed on rawe fleshe. The pagan negros pray to them as gods.
20
ohn Arthur Leeds was born 13th September 1882 at Port Arthur1
in Ontario, Canada, according to the Staff Directory at the
Essanay Studios where he later worked.2 Ancestry.ca has birth
details for Leeds that are a little different: John Arthur Leeds. Born on
Friday, October 13, 1882 in Algoma, Ontario. This location is some 140
miles from Port Arthur, but Port Arthur was then the most accessible nearest
large city for Algoma easily reached by steamboat across Lake Superior. I
would presume that the birth was first registered in Port Arthur, and then
one month later once little John Arthur was thriving in his home town
of Algoma, a place known until 1882 by the Indian name of Ahnapee.
In Leedss early boyhood the remote town of Algoma would have been
somewhat enlivened by the arrival of the railroad, and the growth of some
regional banking business based on fur-trapping, logging and lake trade. But
there seems to have been little else there to retain a hold on a boy who felt
some early talent and ambition. Family life3 in Algoma cant have had much
1 Port Arthur was later incorporated with Fort William and is now known as the city of
Thunder Bay.
2 From the Essanay Studios Staff Directory, compiled by David Kiehn, Historian at the Niles
Essanay Silent Film Museum. Online at 2013 at www.essanaystudios.org The list based on
information in newspapers, trade magazines, films, photographs and from the families of Essanay
personnel. Exact reference is:
Arthur Leeds (John Arthur Leeds) 13 September 1882 Port Arthur, Canada A stage
actor, whose first film work was at the Chicago Essanay studio, and a writer with Selig
for 8 years.
3 Kirks diary mentions the Leeds family was English. Kirks diary is in Lovecrafts New York
Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927. I have been unable to determine the names of his parents.
Kirks diary in Lovecrafts New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927.
21
to recommend it, since at some point Leeds appears to have run away with
the circus. Frank Belknap Long remembered
Arthur Leeds joined a traveling circus as a boy, and did not settle
down to free-lancing [writing] until he was thirty. [i.e: 1913] (He
often discussed those carefree carnival days and even wrote a story,
which he was never able to sell [about the circus] 4
Barnum & Baileys Greatest Show on Earth came through Ontario in July
1895, a major world-class circus which put on 13 stops in the province.5
Leeds was then aged 13. Possibly after a period with this circus he found
himself in the city of Toronto, and began to work there. There he was a
model scene painter and scene maker with the Cummings Stock
Company in Toronto, Canada, in which company he later became
an actor. 6
It seems Leeds was aiming high, even at such a young age. The Cummings
Stock Company was based at Torontos Princess Theatre
The Cummings Stock Company, where Murphy worked, was the
tenant at Torontos Princess Theatre. This dignified building, on
King Street near modern Torontos theater district, was the first
public structure in the city with electric lights. It also housed an art
gallery banquet hall, reception rooms, drawing room, and ballroom.
Two balconies circled the auditorium, which sat over fifteen hundred
people. A few watched the stage from the hush of boxes,
dramatically trussed and draped with curtains.
The company in residence was somewhat more ragtag. For several
seasons, Cummings actors had flooded the city with melodrama, the
most popular type of drama on the continent, alongside adventure
4
Frank Belknap Long, Howard Phillips Lovecraft: dreamer on the nightside, 1975, p.62.
6 Edisons New Editor, The Photoplay Author magazine, April 1915. The Henocksburg
Cummings Stock Company was a joint venture between R. Cummings and theatre owner John
Henocksberg. It appears to have begun in 1897.
22
In 1900 one of lead child actors on the stage for the Cummings Stock
Company was one Mary Pickford, later the pint-sized superstar of the silver
screen. Pickford opened her career with Cummingss production of The
Silver King in 1900, age eight, and learned the craft of tear-jerking
melodrama with the company, a genre representative of their stock repertoire
and of the times. She
did melodrama, in spades. Aimed at the working class, the form
filled the theater with characters still known today, if only through
parody. These included dead, alcoholic, or absent fathers, wolves
and landlords at the door, virtuous wives, and angelic children. The
plays spilled over with toddlers suffering life-threatening illnesses.
Often a child was torn from his mothers arms and thrown into the
poorhouse. But other children were stiff-upper-lip types who
cooked, and cleaned, and spouted wisdom, all the while shivering in
their threadbare clothes. 8
Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, University Press of Kentucky,
1997, pp. 21-22.
7
Ibid, p.23.
23
Presumably these were roles the young Leeds found himself playing, on
becoming more than a scene and model painter. Possibly he even dragged
up, which would make him among the last in a long tradition of boy actors in
drag that stretched back to Elizabethan times
Mary [Pickford] played the touching role of Ned, the heros dying
son. Little girls often played little boys, and sometimes little boys
played girls. 9
At one point Mr. Cummings ran off with the huge box office takings10 from
the highly successful productions. The company appears to have survived his
departure11 and they transferred sometime around 1904 to the United States,
at Louisville, Kentucky.12 There is slim chance that the twenty-two year old
Leeds went with them for a time, but he clearly states that he was working in
Canada in 1905
Leaving [Cummings] he spent the summer of 1905 in stock
travelling throughout Canada and two seasons in repertoire 13
It was at this point he had a fateful encounter with the first cinema
He then came upon the Edison Great Train Robbery14 [and]
became part of a middle western15 company with which he travelled
lecturing on the then marvelous new method and the story itself
while it was being pictured16
9 Ibid, p.25. Pay for a juvenile lead actor at the Cummings Stock Company was, in 1900, a not
inconsiderable $10 a week. One can see why a boy might want to become a stage actor.
10 Eileen Whitfield, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, University Press of Kentucky,
1997, p.23.
11 After the tremendous run their reputation was such that the other local theatre complained
in the press that their business had been soured.
12 New York Times, 15th February 1904, p.10. They had an existing connection there, with
another company and could find richer audiences.
13
14
15 By middle western Leeds presumably means Southwestern Ontario, also known as middle
western Canada, and not the middle west of the United States.
16
The 12-minute Great Train Robbery was a December 1903 release, the
worlds first cowboy western and the movie which educated audiences on the
new storytelling potential of the movies. His encounter with it was
presumably summer 1906, since that was when a touring movie circuit
quickly developed in Canada after the successful establishment of the
Theatorium cinema, the first cinema in the territory,17 and also when the
weather would permit such a circuit. One record of such a summer show
recalls, of Almonte, Ontario
The curious packed the small grand stand at the fair grounds at
night to see The Great Train Robbery, the first of the new films to tell
a story as it went along 18
This certainly suggests that Leeds was back in a type of circus work,
working one of the lesser big top tents of a travelling fair, perhaps as a sort
of combined barker and movie narrator.
Leeds then
went back into repertoire for two years [Autumn 1906 to 1908?]
acting also as stage manager19
Like his movie exhibition company, Leeds also leaves this theatre unnamed.20
He then made the leap to the United States circa 1908
He returned to the motion pictures as a lecturer and manager of a
motion pictures house in Titusville, Penn[sylvania]21
Titusville was then a well-established oil boom town, and the movie house
there was almost certainly the Magnolia, which was the first in the area
17 Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939, p.21. Lovecafts
Providence saw its first proper cinema show in March 1906 (Selected Letters IV, p.355).
18
19
Robert Morris Seilers Reel Time: Movie Exhibitors and Movie Audiences in Prairie Canada, 1896 to
1986 (2013) is unable to provide details of the touring showmen for the film in question.
20
21
301 Julia Street. Built in 1905, the east building originally was a
hotel and saloon. Remodeled as Titusvilles first silent movie house,
the tickets cost 5 cents for children and 10 cents for adults.22
My guess would be that a letter with a full-time job offer was a good way for
Leeds to enter the United States legally from Canada. He doesnt appear to
have stayed with the Magnolia long, moving back into theatre
He again returned to the stage, in musical comedy, with the
Mittenthal productions [while] devoting his spare time to writing
for the stage and cinema23
This would have been Aubrey Mittenthals Attractions (the Mittenthal
company formed for its stock theatre productions), under Aubrey Mittenthal
as creative lead with his brothers as company administrators. In the years
before cinema and radio, musical theatre was booming. The 1906-7 season
had been the most active the American theatre had ever known.24 Leeds may
22
23
24
have started with Mittenthal for the September 1908 season,25 at which time
the Company were based out of the Knickerbocker Building, 114-18 West
39th St., New York City.26 This ran a huge theatrical touring operation...
By 1907, the Mittenthal Brothers had nine different productions
on the road, including seven melodramas and two musical comedies,
encompassing 250 employees and an annual payroll of $400,000
(nearly $9.6 million today).27
25 The theatrical world, like that of education, followed the old English agricultural manner of
dividing the annual calendar, with the main season starting in September.
26
Keith Howard, The Famous Mittenthal Brothers: Theatrical Producers and Managers,
Kalamazoo Public Library website, accessed 2013.
27
28
31
Most of the earliest western movies were made in New York, on Staten Island.
His wife was Helen Halloran (1894-1977), his daughter Aline Dorothy Leeds (1914-1986).
Source: Ancestry.com database.
32
33 Moving Picture Magazine, Apr-Jun 1913. When seen in context, it seems this comment means
movie manufacturers.
29
Leeds also had a son, someone whom I have been unable to get dates for
it appears the son was still living when the genealogical data was submitted.
Below is a flyer for a July 1913 Selig film which gives Leeds a writing
credit
Another of his movie credits was as writer for Dont Let Mother Know,
also from Selig.
30
Various ads like this appeared in 1914 in The Photoplay Author and other magazines,
although only The Photoplay Author ads have the Leeds portrait.
31
32
His rise and fall is detailed in The Writers Monthly during this period.
See my forthcoming book on McNeil, Good Old Mac, for full details of his own career in the
movies.
38
39
For some reason the credit for Everett McNeil was removed from the films
titles. This event caused Arthur Leeds to publically praise McNeils
craftsmanship on The Martyrdom of Philip Strong, in his regular column in
The Writers Monthly magazine of Jan 1916 and to reveal the name of the
man who actually wrote the photoplay for this substantial film.40 One
wonders if the studios barefaced removal of McNeil from the credits may
have triggered Leedss resignation from Edison?
The movie industry was fast waning in New York, as it was enticed to
California by cheap studio lots and all-year sun. By around 1917 the
industry appears to have essentially left New York. Edison formally wrapped
up its Bronx movie division in 1918. The departure of such a vibrant and
well-paying industry appears to have left various future members of the
Lovecraft circle rather financially stranded: such as Leeds; McNeil; and also
Ernest A. Dench.41 At age 35 Leeds no doubt felt too old to face again the
physical demands of stock repertory or cinema acting, and perhaps also too
tied to the East since he had a young wife and children in Chicago. He
does appear to have initially tried to develop a regular industry column,
similar to that which he had in The Writers Monthly, this time in The Music
Trades magazine. He can be found in the latter magazine in December
1921,42 writing a column with a very similar formula, and making known his
qualifications as a connoisseur of recorded music and as an industry insider.
Kirks diary also confirms that Leeds was interested in recorded music. It
seems this work, if work it was, had dried up by the time of the Kalem Club
but it may simply be that the archives for the New York music industry
press of the mid 1920s are not yet online, due to copyright. S.T. Joshi also
40 Leedss statement is confirmed by the sale of the original film script on eBay in 2010, the
script having the name Everett McNeil on it. See my forthcoming book on McNeil Good Old Mac.
See my forthcoming book on McNeil Good Old Mac, for details on Dench and his
involvement with the movies in New York at this time.
41
42
I have been unable to determine when this column began and ended.
34
mentions the Leeds wrote a column for Readers Digest at the time of the
Kalem Club.43 I am uncertain if this was the Readers Digest, or a namesake.
Leeds found himself following McNeil to the cheap rooms available in the
Irish slum of Hells Kitchen, while he tried to write and find paying work.44
Leeds has of course been well documented during the Kalem Club years,
and so I need not detail his activities during this time.45 I will only note that
he was badly underemployed, and had poor luck in placing his writing.
Possibly he had some debts, perhaps back-rent Lovecraft noted afterwards
that he used to be pushed from lodging to lodging for non-payment of
rent.46 To have had to borrow $8 from the seemingly desperately poor
Everett McNeil of all people the famous cause of the split meetings of
the Kalem Club suggest Leeds was in dire financial straits by the mid
1920s. Yet Lovecraft states that Leeds always kept immaculately dressed and
shaven at this time, despite his poverty. See the Kirk diary for the details of
Leeds at this time, and the account of his rather sad stint of work in Kirks
bookshop. Kirk reports that Leeds returned to Chicago in late summer
1926.
He does not appear to have written quality short stories at this time,
although he landed one pulp shocker in Weird Tales in 192547 and another in
Adventure.48 Lovecraft himself stated in 1931 that Leeds has come on
slightly better times, through his side-line of the drama.49 Possibly this
means he had found occasional roles as an older male actor in Chicago or as a
43
S.T. Joshi in Lovecrafts New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927, p.141.
He went through a wide variety of addresses. See Lovecraft in Lord of a Visible World, p.279.
This seems to be reflected in the opening of Lovecrafts story Cool Air.
44
45 I refer interested readers to the primary sources of the letters in The Lovecraft Letters Volume 2:
Letters from New York, and Kirks diary in Lovecrafts New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927, as
well as to the Selected Letters, and S.T. Joshis various biographical works on Lovecraft.
46
47
Lovecraft in Lord of a Visible World, p.279. Something reflected in the opening of Cool Air
Return of the Undead, Weird Tales, November 1925.
48
S.T. Joshi in Lovecrafts New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927, p.141.
49
playwright, but I have found no online evidence of either. By June 1932 S.T.
Joshi notes that Leeds was back in Brooklyn, New York City.50
There is a hint from Robert Barlow which suggests Leeds may have been
selling correspondence courses in the mid 1930s.51 In February 1935, in the
depths of the great depression, Leeds was reduced to selling self-help
booklets in the ad pages of Popular Mechanics magazine and Popular Science
Monthly. These adverts give an address for him in early 1935: 2736 W 16th
St., Brooklyn. This was an Italian section, presumably with cheap rooms.
Leeds attended the Second Eastern States Science Fiction Convention in
New York (February 21st 1937). His name appeared in the Novae Terrae
fanzine which listed those attending the convention, and the editor noted
These names were all quite well known in those days, and to find
so many of them grouped together at one meeting must have been a
terrific thrill for ordinary fans. 52
I can find no other online record of his involvement in early SF fandom, such
as fannish articles or a fanzine. But such items may yet turn up, as the
fannish record is only partly available online.
Maria Kirk Hart mentions53 that Leeds found writing work the same year
with one of the sprawling catalogue of guidebooks published by the Federal
Writers Project. This was a depression-era works assistance project which
gave work to unemployed writers, and quickly developed The American
Guide Series and The American Life Series. It ran 1935-1941, and
thereafter appears to have run on as a reprint imprint into the 1960s. The
50
S.T. Joshi, Lovecrafts New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927, p.141
Barlows dig at Leeds in the opening of the Lovecraft-Barlow story The Battle that Ended
the Century (1934)... The Wolf was fresh from his correspondence course in physical training,
sold to him by Mr. Arthur Leeds.
51
52 Novae Terrae #11 (April 1937). Fanzine. The reference to in those days is due to a
whimsical style employed in the report, in which the author pretends to write as someone in the
future.
53
Maria Kirk Hart, introduction to Lovecrafts New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927, p.15.
36
evidence for Leedss involvement with the FWP is shown by several articles
or letters from him published in the New York Times:
by ARTHUR LEEDS, Editor History and Landmarks, Federal
Writers Project 54
ARTHUR LEEDS, Editor History and Landmarks, New York
City Guide 55
The Guide was later defended by Leeds in another New York Times article
THE NEW YORK CITY GUIDE; One of Its Editors Defends Work of
Federal Writers Project
It rather amused me, in reading L. Effingham De Forests letter in
The Times recently, to note that he begins his comment by offering
the opinion that a new and revised chronology of important events in
New York Citys history is rather unnecessary, and then, about ten
lines further down, states that in the last twenty years the history of
this city has been largely rewritten, while much new material has
been added. 56
The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers Project Guide to 1930s
New York: a Comprehensive Guide to the Five Boroughs of the Metropolis was
published in 1939, and is now online in digital facsimile in the 1939 Random
House New York City Guide edition.57 The Leeds name is not on the page
listing the Editorial Staff of the Guide. Indeed, there is no credit in it
anywhere for Arthur Leeds, and the same is true of the companion 1938
volume New York Panorama: a Companion to the WPA Guide to New York City:
a Comprehensive View of the Metropolis Presented in a Series of Articles. While
researching the Guide its team had uncovered various errors introduced by
54
New York Times, NEW YORK LANDMARKS; New York City Guide Editors Eager
for..., May 5, 1936.
55
56
37
historians into the historical record. Did the public controversy Leeds stirred
over this matter in The New York Times mean he was later overlooked in the
credits? Leftist politics may also have played a part in such an erasure, if it
was such. The New Yorks Federal Writers division is said to have been
infested with bickering socialists belonging to various competing grouplets
and political sects, and as a result it was
Plagued by internal dissension, external political pressures and
other problems, it took a couple of years before the New York
FWPs work appeared, garnering skepticism and ridicule. 58
After 1937 Arthur Leeds appears to vanish from the online record,
although I have found that a naturalization petition was filed by an Arthur
Leeds in New York Southern District, 7th January 1946.59
There is not yet a sure death date for Leeds, despite the best efforts of
Lovecraft scholars to discover one. A possible death date of 1952 has been
mooted, and Kenneth W. Faig Jr. has kindly informed me that the
dedication page of the Arkham House book The Shuttered Room (1959)
indicates that Leeds was by then deceased.
Overleaf: a Leeds short story that was obviously one of the several inspirations for
Lovecrafts story Cool Air. One thus wonders if Cool Air arose from a session of
the Kalem Club in which they discussed how Leedss The Man Who Shunned The
Light might be improved and developed, followed by Lovecraft writing up the ideas
with a view to landing it in Weird Tales and giving the desperately poor Leeds half
the pay-cheque? Sadly it was rejected by Weird Tales, and one wonders if this was
because the editor Wright recognized the origin in a previously published story?
58 Barbara Cohen, The Federal Writers Project (FWP), 14th July 2012, at
www.newyorkboundbooks.com The entire manuscript records of the WPA writers Project have
been microfilmed and are held at the Municipal Archives of New York City.
59
Located on ancestry.com
38
It was then eleven in the forenoon, and I spent the best part of the time
until two oclock making wild guesses as to what Langhorne could possibly
mean, and what it was that he so earnestly desired to communicate to me.
The taxicab which I engaged took me to the address mentioned in the note
in less than half-an-hour; and as I dismissed the driver and mounted the
steps, I remembered thinking that, in this great city of New York, a man
might very easily become as far removed from his former associates, if he so
desired, as if he were to journey to St. Petersburg or Yokohama.
As I opened the door and stepped into the hallway, I noticed that the
accumulated dust of many months covered everything. I suppose I am
somewhat of a crank on that subject, for on discovering nothing anywhere
that resembled a hat-rack or hall-tree, I continued to hold my hat in my
hand in preference to laying it on the heavily coated chair standing against
the wall on my left. It did not need my old friends letter to convince me that
he had been living alone for a long time. And what in the name of common
sense was the man doing with the whole house as it seemed to me, if one
could judge by the heaviness of the air sealed up on a stifling August
afternoon? The place was as musty and close-smelling as a department store
on a Monday morning; I held the street-door open for a moment or two,
allowing the bright sunlight and what little breeze was stiring to enter, before
I advanced farther into the hall.
At the end of this hallway, and facing the front entrance, was another door
covered with a heavy damask curtain. I closed the street-door quietly, and
advancing toward the rear door, laid my hand on the knob. I cannot explain
what it was that made me hesitate to turn it. I can only compare the
sensation to that which one experiences when, having laid a hand on one side
of an electric knife-switch, he hesitates to complete the circuit by touching
the other side, not knowing the severity of the shock which he may receive.
A moments pause, and then the curiosity to know all that my old friends
letter had meant, urged me on. I swung open the door and advanced into the
room.
40
The stuffiness of the hallway was nothing compared with the odorsome
closeness of this apartment. I glanced about, wondering if it were possible
that the room was without a window. As my eyes turned to the left however,
I saw that a window was there; but it, like the door by which I had entered,
was heavily curtained. Observing this, I seemed to become conscious, for the
first time, of the fact that the room was lighted solely by the electrolier that
blazed down from the center of the ceiling at half past two on a bright
autumn afternoon! If Langhorne had recently been at work or reading in this
room, why did he choose the electric light instead of the illumination
provided by nature?
The intense curiosity, mingled with a vague alarm, that had filled my mind
since reading his note, was growing momentarily greater. Where was he
now? Why was he not here to receive me?
A second glance around the room showed me almost exactly what I had
expected to find there. In the corner to the right of the curtained window,
stood a roll-top desk, before which was placed a three-fold, tapestry-covered
screen, in such a way as to hide the greater part of the desk from my view.
Shelves, reaching to the ceiling, lined that side of the room opposite the
window; these were partly filled with books, portfolios and scientific
magazines.
There were, however, several things in the room from which I deduced the
fact that Langhorne had been living, practically, in this one large apartment,
for some time, at least. In one corner stood a rather short Davenport-bed.
Not far from it, and connected by a rubber tube with an iron pipe rising a few
inches from the floor, was a small gas-stove standing on a little table. It was
evident that Langhorne had not only been sleeping in this room of late, but
had also prepared his own meals there. I remembered having noticed a firstclass restaurant only a block down the street, and my surprise increased
accordingly. My friends epicurean tastes in the past had more than once
caused me to warn him against dire results of eating and drinking too well.
41
side of the chair; the hand was tightly clenched. His right arm was sprawling
across the desk, and the hand, which gripped a graduate-glass, was resting
against the drawers at the back. There still remained on the inside of the
glass perhaps a teaspoonful of dark, purplish liquid, and the fingers which
grasped it, as well as the white blotter beneath, were stained a deep brown,
recalling the discoloration left by a solution of potassium permanganate.
After the first shock, I had involuntarily reached out to grasp Langhornes
shoulder. But even as I did so, I paused and drew back my arm.
His face was turned to the right; his eyes, wide open, seemed fixed with
staring fascination at the glass in his hand. And in the corner, close at the
hand, an envelope stood upright against the drawer. On it I read the one
wordMarden. In front of this, flat on the desk, lay a sheet of typewriter
bond paper, upon which, in large letters, had been written the startling
request:
Do not touch me, Marden! Do not lay a finger upon me until you have
read this letter!
In spite of myself, I shuddered as I read the admonition. There was
something terrifying, some sinister suggestion in the words. Not that it was
necessary to touch the man to tell that he was dead. The ashen face, the
wide, staring eyes, the blackened lips, stained with the same brown color
which disfigured the hand from all these signs I judged that at least an hour
must have passed since life had fled from this pitiable heap before me. It was
the note that I dreaded; some unknown horror seemed to be lurking in its
message.
In spite of myself, I felt that I would give almost anything if I could only
avoid opening it at all. But Langhornes last wish, his dying request, in fact,
had been that I read this message and share his secret, whatever it was, with
him. With a trembling hand I picked up the envelope and tore it open, and
read:
"My dear old friend, in this, my last hour, I can turn only to you. Not for
43
pity, though, Marden; pity and sympathy are not for such as I. I seek only
your assistance in what will be my final experiment. I have met with
considerable success in the past, as you know, I have proved my theories
correct, as a rule; only once or twice have my experiments failed. My
heartfelt prayer to God, now is, that this last test of my knowledge will be
successful also. First, however, I must tell you my miserable story.
You will remember the night when, just after you had returned from the
Pacific coast, we met at the bar of the Cadillac. Kenyon was with me when
you came in, and so was young Ludlowthe fellow some of the boys used
to call the Lucios diamond kid. You will remember, also, that while you
were with us, Ludlow behaved himself extremely wellfor Ludlow.
About ten oclock, you left us, saying; that you were going home. After
you had gone, we drifted over to Churchills; and it was shortly after one
oclock when Ludlow and I (Kenyon went off about midnight) were
requested to leave the back room of a saloon in the neighborhood of
Columbus Circle. I can remember passing the monument as we started
home. I hadnt told you where I was living Mardenin fact, I hadnt told
anyone. Knowing me as you did in the old days, you know why. When I
worked, I worked with all there was in me to labor with. I didnt want to be
disturbed; I didnt want to be tempted away when my work called me. I
knew my weakness; so I cut myself off from everyone. I met you three
fellows that night by the merest chance.
But it was the devil in the form of Ludlow who walked with me that
night, Marden. As we staggered along, he kept up a running fire of
sneering remarks. First I was a would-be-famous scientist. Then I was the
greatest bluff that ever graduated. Finally he declared that I was a hermit, a
recluse merely for the sake of being called eccentric, but clever.
The liquor, I suppose, must have made me good-natured, rather than
otherwise, for I simply laughed at his insults; and we went on together.
Then, two blocks away from here, I said good-night and tried to leave him;
but it was of no avail.
Again and again, he asked me to take him to where I was living. At last
he dared me to take him home with me. Mad, drunken fool that I must
have been, I did.
44
Tears filled my eyes as I concluded this terrible letter. The laying bare of a
mans innermost soul. I knew Langhornes sensitive nature; I realized how
the constant brooding upon his crime had so preyed upon him, that the poor,
broken, prematurely gray-haired wreck of a man that now sprawled in the
office-chair was the result. As for his experiment poor Langhorne. I
understood, now, that toward the end, his mind had given away, and that the
swallowing of the draught in the graduate-glass had produced no other result
than he might have brought about with a well-aimed revolver bullet.
Something seemed to bedim the brightness of the electrolier, and a gloom
which penetrated to the depths of my soul filled me as I laid the letter back
on the desk and looked around. The Davenport caught my eye; I would lay
the remains of my poor friend there, while I went out to notify the proper
authorities. That part of the letter referring to his crime, I would destroy; and
his secret, as he had said, would be safe with me. The other parts of his note
would make plain the manner in which he had ended his own life. I could,
of course, have made use of the telephone to get in communication with
those who must now be called in, but I longed to get a breath of fresh air,
47
and to escape into the very sunlight that poor Langhome had apparently
dreaded so deeply.
I had laid my hat down on the Davenport; now I picked it up and put it on
the table. Then, crossing again to the chair-truly as he had said, a death
chair-I stopped and placed my left hand upon the mans shoulder while at
the same time I grasped his right hand in an attempt to detach the glass from
the cramped fingers.
As I did so, that part of what sat there in the chair, crumpled under my
touch and fell away, like the sand falling through an hour-glass, and as I
reeled back in unutterable dismay and horror, I saw the right sleeve flatten
out limply upon the desk, while in place of the hand which held the graduate
was a small heap of gray-black dust!
I closed my eyes. As I opened them again, I saw in the chair only a
disordered pile of clothing, with a great deal more of the gray-black dust on
the floor and the arms of the chair. Scattered about were little bunches of
prematurely gray hair, and I knew, as I gazed, that Randall Langhornes last
experiment had been crowned with success!
scene, and as an author in her own right.2 In the early 20th century Miniter
was a central figure at amateur press conventions, publishing The Amateur
and the post-convention report journal The Aftermath (1907-1921, possibly
not annually) with Helen M. Small. Lovecraft wrote Miniter a number of
poems, including one for her cat titled To Tat (Edith Miniters Cat). Miniter
and Lovecraft wrote affectionate parodies of each others work.
A longtime resident of Boston, when she was older Mrs Miniter went to
live in retirement with her cousin Evanore Olds Beebe (1858-1935)3 east of
Wilbraham in a rural part of Western Massachusetts.4 Lovecraft later visited
the house. I have discovered that Evanore Beebe was an interesting
personage in her own right, and this essay largely serves to excavate facts
about Beebe and her locality from the accessible historical record.
1 1867 is correct. In public Mrs Miniter habitually took two years off her actual age. My
thanks to Kenneth W. Faig Jr. for this information.
2 See Kenneth W. Faig Jr.s edited collections The coast of Bohemia and other writings by Edith
Miniter, Moshassuck Press, 2000; Dead Houses and Other Works by Edith Miniter, Hippocampus
Press, 1998; Going home and other amateur writings by Edith Miniter, Moshassuck Press, 1995; and also
her novel Our Natupski Neighbors, Henry Holt & Co., 1916. Miniters papers passed to Lovecraft
and are now held in the library of Brown University.
3 According to one Web account by Lovecraftian tourist Donovan K. Loucks, who wrote of
his rather unfruitful visit to the area in New England Odyssey, Beebe was pronounced beebee. Miss Beebe died at home on 29th May 1935, and she was buried at Glendale Cemetery.
4 Before which the aging Mrs Miniter was briefly given a home by amateur press publisher
Charles A.A. Parker: The Parkers did make a home for Edith Miniter in their Malden home in
1924-25, before Edith returned to her birthplace of Wilbraham, Massachusetts to spend her final
years. Kenneth Faig, Jr., Charles A.A. Parker (1878-1965), in The Fossil #347, January 2011.
49
5 Entry on Beebe in Encyclopedia of Massachusetts, Volume 10. (1916). Her uncle was Marcus
Daniels, and Beebe had cared for his ailing wife for many years.
6
From a letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by David Shultz.
9 Chauncey E. Peck (Ed.), The History of Wilbraham Massachusetts Prepared in Connection With the
Celebration of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town, June 15 (1913).
51
Vintage postcard of North Wilbraham railroad station. If Lovecraft was arriving on the Athol
line then he might have arrived at the adjacent Collins Depot and had to cross the tracks.
The sort of Ford farm truck that might have greeted Lovecraft at North Wilbraham rail
depot: a Ford 1929 Model AA Stake Truck. Photo: Karen Schwallie.
52
53
Beebe was a schoolteacher for 18 years, according to Womans Whos Who of America, 1918.
When in her late 50s Beebe was also appointed head of the local Historical Committee, a
body which produced the first history book on the area, The History of Wilbraham (1913).
15
16 Lovecraft otherwise noted of the house that... The place is very neat from a letter to
his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by David Shultz.
17 The lack of paid labourers might suggest that her farm fields were let or contracted to
neighbouring farmers?
Lovecraft noted that... the only help is a boy named Chauncey, who sits at table with the
family. He was taken from the poorhouse in Attleboro but seems a delightfully gentlemanly
person. from a letter to Lovecrafts aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by
David Shultz. Chauncey is given a bit-part in The Dunwich Horror. An orphan, he was
presumably named by Beebe after the local poet Chauncey Edwin Peck, suggesting Beebe
remained on good terms with Peck after the publication of their 1913 book.
18
19 A Bulletin of the National Research Council report of 1923 suggests the then Springfield
Ethnological and Natural History Museum may have been unsuitable for her collection in the
1920s: being reported as being cramped in extremely inadequate quarters and badly
underfunded even before the Great Depression, and used for exhibitions only. Larger premises
were secured in the mid 1920s.
54
Mrs Edith Miniter. With entry from Womans Whos Who, 1914-15.
My enquiries with the local Directors Office of the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum were
kindly and swiftly answered. I am grateful for their search of computerised and paper records.
They found an accession record for Miss Beebe relating only to one harness makers bench and
one additional numbered, but unnamed object, but they no longer have the bench. Margaret
Humberston, the head of Library and Archives at the Lyman and Merrie Wood Museum of
Springfield History, then kindly undertook a newspaper search. She found an... article in August
1935 in which it is noted that Miss Beebes collection was instead sold at auction. One has to
assume that either there was no space or funds for housing the collection in a local museum, or
that in the midst of the Great Depression her relatives had to realise the collections cash
value. The press article on the auction is Extensive collection of antiques of late Evanore O.
Beebe is sold. It gives extensive details and the names of the major purchasers. It states that
note books and old ledgers were sold in the hayloft of the barn, that Miss Beebe kept a visitors
book in which was noted the names of all her visitors (if Lovecraft had signed it, it might now be
worth four figures), and that the sale brought in $1,500 on the first of three days. By comparison,
in 1935 Lovecrafts story At the Mountains of Madness was sold to Astounding for $350.
55
Miss Beebe aged about 61, planting a First World War victory tree at a school in Wilbraham
in 1918 or 1919. From: Wilbraham by Coralie M. Gray, Arcadia Publishing, 2001.
56
A 20th century view of the Beebe house, painted up and sans covered porch. Possibly circa
1960s, judging by the sharpness of the lens, and the phone wires? Photo: Wilbraham Library.
58
Although an invalid at the time of the visit Miss Beebe was evidently not
housebound, since Lovecraft noted of her that
She drives about in a horse & buggy24
On the visit Miss Beebe and Mrs Miniter evidently related to Lovecraft
much local antiquarian knowledge and folklore, and the whippoorwill folk
beliefs in particular have been widely noted as entered his fiction in The
Dunwich Horror.
He notes that Beebe was a fountain of weird anecdote,25 and that
The region [of Wilbraham], being very old and remote, is full of the
most extraordinary folklore; some of which will certainly find
lodgment in my future stories if I ever live to write any more.26
Despite her known abiding interest in the local superstitions and folklore,
Mrs. Miniter (and presumably also the highly intelligent & cultivated Miss
Beebe) shared Lovecrafts outright skepticism on the actual existence of the
supernatural. Lovecraft wrote
Notwithstanding her saturation with the spectral lore of the
countryside, Mrs. Miniter did not care for stories of a macabre or
supernatural cast; regarding them as hopelessly extravagant and
unrepresentative of life. [He also notes that Miniter also wrote, and
probably published] antiquarian articles.27
23 Lovecraft refers to Pooh-Bah, the Lord High- Everything-Else of the famous Mikado.
Lovecraft notes that by 1928 the house had the telephone by which Beebe communicated with
and dominated various local committees from a letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly
supplied in transcript by David Shultz.
24 From a Lovecraft letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by
David Shultz. Presumably she could not walk any substantial distance.
25
26
Ibid.
Lovecraft to Zelia Bishop, 28th July 1928, Selected Letters II, p.244.
59
I have however been able to see in full an unpublished letter from Lovecraft to his aunt, written
from the Beebe house to his aunt Lillian D. Clark, dated 1st July 1928. The manuscript of the
letter is held at the John Hopkins Library at Brown University. My thanks for this to Mary
Krawczak Wilson, S.T. Joshi, and David E. Schultz. Part of the letter is given by S.T. Joshi in The
Thing on the Doorstep (Penguin Classics, 2001) on p.410. S.T. Joshi also quotes briefly from the
same letter again on p.411 of the Penguin Classics edition, giving Lovecrafts view of the state and
social division of the local population: this is something he clearly reflects in the social structure
that is described in the story The Dunwich Horror.
28
See footnote one. Her novel is also available free in digital facsimile on Archive.org.
29
Due to cost I have not been able to see the Miniter books referred to in footnote one.
30
Extensive collection of antiques of late Evanore O. Beebe is sold, The Springfield Republican.
31
Ella Shannon Bowles, About Antiques, J.B. Lippincott, 1929. p.255 onwards.
32
Canal and covered wagon.33 When Evanore, his youngest child was
born, the log cabin had been abandoned for a comfortable frame
house in the coming city of Fond du Lac. Here the future
antiquarian began her life-work of collecting by saving every bit of
pretty china or glass to be found in the home. In 1879 she returned
to the East, and went to live in the house in Wilbraham,34
Massachusetts which she still occupies. In this way, you see, the
family circle was completed, as Wilbraham is the next town to
Ludlow. The house is called Maplehurst, since huge maple trees
march up and down the road as far as the eye can see. The only
alteration in the hundred-year-old mansion is the removal of the
partitions,35 making a few large rooms of many small ones, in order
that Miss Beebes collection may show to the best advantage.
It is interesting to learn how she started it. A gift of pink
Staffordshire36 from her uncle37 was the pivot, and the work of
completing the set occupied many happy hours. Her dishes now
cover walls in rows! She began saving [glass] bottles when they were
the despised of amateurs, and her method of hanging them in
windows, known for years as Beebe style is now generally
adopted.38 The collecting of glass came along with china, and her
33 See the restored version of the epic feature film How the West Was Won (1962) for an
evocative and faithful recreation of those times and that exact trip.
34
Then aged 20, to live with her uncle Marcus Daniels and to care for his ailing wife.
35
Note that partitions are also removed in Lovecrafts The Dunwich Horror.
Meaning glazed ceramic china made in North Staffordshire in the English Midlands. It
seems the Beebe family traced their origins to Staffordshire/Warwickshire in the English
Midlands, since it is stated elsewhere that her ancient family records were reputed to be held in
Aston Hall in north Birmingham, in the English Midlands.
36
37 The uncles name was Marcus Daniels. An article from the Springfield Weekly Republican,
Evanore Beebes Collection Goes to Historical Society (4th Aug 1927), noted of Beebe that in
her early years of building the collection... she started attending auctions when it wasnt quite the
proper thing for a woman to do. The same article notes that she estimated that 75% of her
collection had been inherited by her.
38 One wonders if Lovecraft was thus put in mind of his depiction of the mysterious bottles in
his earlier story The Terrible Old Man (1920)? One even wonders if a version of this aspect of
her cousins collection, related orally or by letter by Miniter to Lovecraft, may have helped shaped
this minor but vivid element of his story.
61
glass-closet, made from the former entrance to the wine cellar of the
house, contains over a thousand small pieces. And the best part of
the collection is the fact that Miss Beebe lives with it! At
Maplehurst you sit on a three-legged stool, or a Hitchcock or
Windsor chair, eat from a tip-table, stir your tea with a rat-tail
spoon, and sleep on feathers in a corded bed!
Cats, numbering from seven to fourteen, wander at will over
sideboards loaded with Sandwich glass, and at least two dogs sleep in
Boston rockers or on settee cradles!39
The house has many visitors, as you may well guess, and they come
all the way from the Pacific coast to Maine. Since nothing is ever
sold at Maplehurst, it has been possible for Miss Beebe to specialize
on articles of all occurrences of importance in her locality. People are
willing to give or sell her valuable objects because they know their
heirlooms will be cherished by one who loves them. She has never
spared time nor effort in the work of preserving matters of local
history. An instance of this are her investigations in regard to the
Ludlow Glass Factory of which I have told you.40
Miss Beebe is a fascinating conversationalist, and is constantly
being consulted for the truth in regard to local historical occurrences.
The town histories of Wilbraham and Ludlow owe more to her than
to anyone else.41 And, best of all, she loves to tell the stories quaint,
39
Beebe had heard tell of an old pre-war glass factory at Ludlow, questioned every adult in the
locality on it, and was laughed at by the farmers for her quest. But she eventually found one very
old woman who remembered where the factory was. From that lead a fellow historian was able
to comb the official land records and confirm the details of a very early glass factory on the site.
Beebes collection of Ludlow bottles 1812-30 is listed in the book Early American Glass (1948).
40
Possibly Beebes story of the failure of this glass factory was what Lovecraft alludes to in The
Dunwich Horror, when he writes of the locality that Industry did not flourish here, and the
nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived.
41 Chauncey E. Peck (Ed.), The History of Wilbraham Massachusetts Prepared in Connection With the
Celebration of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town, June 15 (1913).
Local poet Chauncey E. Peck was officially editor, Beebe being appointed his secretary. Sadly the
book contains no section on superstitions or folklore, indeed no mention of it that I can find, by
which Lovecraftians might have learned more of the local folklore told to Lovecraft on his visit.
62
tragic, or comic of her platters and tea caddies, pine desks and birdseye maple tables, the Bennington cow, the hound pitcher, and the
unique cup-plate upon which a lover presents his lady-love with a
pig!
Every paper on old-time lore written by a conscientious club
woman assists in preserving the traditions of New England or of any
part of the country about which she chooses to tell.42
Beebe was also known to have also collected or inherited early womens
needle and fabric works, and antique clothes
[not only] garments of ye olden times, but rare antique linen
spreads and covers of exquisite workmanship43
An article from the Springfield Weekly, circa 1920s,44 states many of the
spreads had been made by Beebes grandmother, an Anne Gardiner of
Gardiners Island...
When she was weaving the spreads, the witches got so thick in the
spinning room that she had to move across a brook to banish them.
[and Miss Beebe told the reporter of this, that she did this because]
Witches cant cross running water.
Presumably this Anne Gardiner is the grandmother Lovecraft referred to,
when he wrote to Robert E. Howard...
I know an old lady in Wilbraham whose grandmother, about a
century ago, was said to be able to raise a wind by muttering at the
sky.45
By such connections...
42
43
Springfield Weekly Republican, Evanore Beebes Collection Goes to Historical Society, 4th
Aug 1927.
44
45
47
The History of Wilbraham (1913), p.358. I have found an online transcript of Rev. [Noah]
Atwater's 1787 Diary, a Wilbraham diary made in an old farmers almanac. Interestingly it gives
the name of Hoadly as being a local man known to Atwater and from whom he purchased
cows. A fictitious Rev. Abijah Hoadley appears in Lovecrafts The Dunwich Horror, based on
Wilbraham. On a more likely source for Hoadley, see the note that follows this essay.
48
49
S.T. Joshi, in Lovecrafts Library, states his collection was then one of the finest in the country.
64
be found anything that was modem. The fireplace with its ancient
foot stoves and warming pans, was decidedly unique, and scattered
about the room were the Beebe coat of arms worked here and there,
an old sampler of 1793, a Hancocks Bible sent in by a gentleman
living at a distance, a replica of a ladys sewing table, charts dating
long ago, and more china. In an old closet was glassware of every
description; this was fitted up with furnishings from an old
Wilbraham house. In one of the upstairs rooms was a fine rare
collection of old almanacs and anti-slavery documents. A chair
nearby contained a full gentlemans costume of the old time, with tall
hat, vest, gloves, necktie and collar. On a large, curious bed was
arranged a young womans costume of 75 years ago. The replica of a
room of 1830 contained an old-fashioned high bed, rag carpet, wax
flowers, and on the bed referred to, the entire costume of an old-time
lady. The tables here and all through the house were draped in
homespun and old-time fabrics used as backgrounds. The piazza was
perhaps the most interesting of all, and here were arranged various
curiosities, many hardly understood by the present generation, such
as a bee smoker for driving out bees, queer reels and wheels, strange
appearing cradles, a pedlers trunk50, a picture painted by Miss
Brewer, second preceptress [head teacher] of the academy, a large
bread trough in which children could be rocked in case of
emergency, queer lanterns, ladies caps and slippers, baskets and
unique examples of the photographers art. The Mixter tavern,
where the exhibit was held and in which Miss Beebe makes her
home, is nearly as ancient as the treasures that it holds and admirably
adapted for the purpose. Miss Beebe was assisted in her explanation
of the antiques by Mrs. Edith Miniter of Boston.
50
51 Unpublished letter from Lovecraft to his aunt, written from the Beebe house to his aunt
Lillian D. Clark, dated 1st July 1928. The manuscript of the letter is held at the John Hopkins
Library at Brown University. My thanks for this to Mary Krawczak Wilson, S.T. Joshi, and David
E. Schultz. Part of the letter is given by S.T. Joshi in The Thing on the Doorstep (Penguin Classics,
2001) on p.410. There had been a thunderstorm on the Sunday, in which Lovecraft was caught
while attempting the visit the mountain (probably Wigwam Hill, the nearest peak to the Beebe
house), which had presumably provoked the fine display of fireflies on Sunday evening.
52
Lovecraft letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, supplied in transcript by David Shultz.
53 He and Miniter had tried to reach the mountain, but were forced back by the heavy rain.
That he later achieved it is noted in a letter to Zelia Bishop (Selected Letters II, 28th July 1928,
p.244), when he writes of his... walk around the mountain and almost over its crest.
66
Lovecraft carried catnip with him, to attract local cats while on his various travels.
58
59
Letter to Galpin, dated 17th January 1936, quoted online by Chris Perridas.
67
The object of this 1935 visit was to fulfill a long-delayed promise to scatter
the ashes of Mrs. Miniters mother, Mrs. Dowe who had died in 1919.60
Presumably this was Mrs. Miniters last wish, Miniter herself having died 8th
June 1934. S.T. Joshi states that half of Mrs. Dowes ashes went into a local
burying ground called the Dell cemetery, and the other half scattered in the
rose garden at Beebes Maplehurst house.61 If Chris Perridas is correct that
this rose garden was once beloved by Dowe62, then this last gesture
might imply that Mrs. Dowe had also once shared the Maplehurst house
with a then-younger Miss Beebe, prior to her death in 1919?
At the time of the scattering of the Dowe ashes Miss Beebe was no longer
at her house, having died there some four months earlier on 29th May 1935.
Presumably the public auction of Miss Beebes collections and effects was
over by the latter part of September 1935, and the house was by then cleared
by her relatives. Perhaps Maplehurst was still empty, it then being the
middle of the Great Depression and many local houses empty.63 But the
local newspaper assured readers that Beebes cats would still be able to
luxuriate in their accustomed beds of catnip64 after her death, suggesting
that the house was set to be swiftly sold to Denny Smith and his family, and
that he had agreed to keep the cats on as farm mousers.
60 On Mrs. Dowe I note that... Mrs. Miniter furnished a magnificent tribute in the form of a
biographical sketch of her mother in the amateur press, according to H.P. Lovecraft in the essay
Mrs. Miniter Estimates and Recollections, in Miscellaneous Writings, Arkham House, 1995, p.
472. Jennie Elizabeth Tupper Dowe (d.1919) was an amateur journalist and songwriter in her
own right. On her life and work see the essay in: In Memoriam, Jennie E.T. Dowe, W.P. Cook, 1921.
On her poems see Kenneth W. Faig Jr., When Grandma Went A-Courting: Ancestral Romance
in the Poetry of Jennie E.T. Dowe and Edith Miniter, a limited edition pamphlet circa 1999.
61
62
According to Chris Perridas. H P. Lovecraft And His Legacy blog, Whippoorwills II.
There had been depopulation in some rural areas of the New England in the 1930s. Even
before the times of hardship, Lovecraft implied that many Wilbraham houses were empty...
63
Nothing had changed the hills, the road, the dead houses, the village all the
same letter in O Fortunate Floridian, p.293. Quoted by S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence.
64
Quite what occurred on the other two days of the 1935 Wilbraham area
visit I have not been able to discover. S.T. Joshi gives the trip dates as 20th23rd September 1935, so one imagines it was perhaps a three-day visit.
Possibly it was only an arrive afternoon spend one day leave the next
morning three-day trip. There may be a few more details to be found in the
collected volumes of Lovecraft letters to Galpin and to Barlow which
mention the visit, but to which I do not currently have access.65
Conclusion:
To conclude the body of this essay, it may be useful for me to now briefly list
the fiction by H.P. Lovecraft which, it has been variously suggested, may
have been influenced by his 1928 visit:
1. The Dreams in the Witch-House (1932): possibly influenced by the
Polish folklore in Miniters novel Our Natupski Neighbors. Perhaps
there was even an influence from this novels (still) unpublished sequel,
since one wonders if Lovecraft may have read the sequel in typescript
during his stay in 1928?66
2. The Dunwich Horror (1928):
i. the commonly cited and central incorporation of the folklore of the
whip-poor-wills or whippoorwills.67 The local Wilbraham boy from
65 The letter is in O Fortunate Floridian: H.P. Lovecrafts Letters to R.H. Barlow, University of
Tampa Press, 2007. Sadly I do not have access to this book. The Galpin letter is 17th January
1936, as quoted by Chris Perridas.
66 Possibly not, since Lovecraft might have noted this in his letter to his aunt dated 1ts July
1928. In this letter he does note that he read another novel while there, A Mirror for Witches, by
Esther Forbes.
67 Timothy H. Evans in Journal of Folklore Research (2005, vols.42-43, p.117) cites Faye Ringels
book New Englands Gothic literature (1995) to claim Lovecraft learned of this lore from Hazards
Recollections of olden times (1879), a book wrongly claimed by both Evans and Ringel to be a
collection of Rhode Island folklore (it is actually simply half recollections, and half genealogies,
and the whippoorwill belief is incidental and attributed to a madwoman). But evidently they are
both wrong. Lovecraft learned this folklore from Miniter or Beebe, since he writes of it that... I
heard [it] only last month during my sojourn in Wilbraham (Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P.
Lovecraft and August Derleth, p.151).
69
I fully agree with Joshis assessment. The storys setting is an artful combination of the real:
too rounded and symmetrical Wilbraham Mountains; the blasted lifeless spot on the Mountains;
east Wilbraham and the road with rickety covered bridges (one collapsed in 1938) that Lovecraft
took to get to the house from North Wilbraham rail depot; possibly a farmhouse known to
Lovecraft at Athol, perhaps combined with aspects of the old Randolph Beebe house; Beebes
huge barn; and of course the Bears Den. Where Lovecraft had the the great rings of roughhewn stone columns on the hilltops from is likely to remain unknown, since this gothic flourish
could have been inspired by any one of the large numbers of glacial boulders and stone structures
to be found on many New England hilltops. The Moodus Noises supplied the earth noises.
70 The Whateley farm is described as... a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a
hillside four miles from the village. The Beebe house is some two miles from Wilbraham, over
the Mountains.
70
out all the partitions just as Ella Shannon Bowles (1929) says
Beebe had done in order to house her ever-growing collection.
vi. I note elsewhere in this essay that several points of local history
seem to be incorporated into the story: the failed glass factory, the
1747 date (see appendix four), the locales unusual social hierarchy.
vii. while at the Beebe house in 1928 Lovecraft read the novel A
Mirror for Witches, by Esther Forbes.71 Forbess 1928 novel of Salem
witchcraft has a heroine bearing a resemblance to the girl of The
Dunwich Horror. Doll Bilby72 is a small and wild-eyed outsider girl
who loves nature, but who is accused of witchcraft. Her accusers
establish the facts of this at every stage of her life, and thus prove that
she was growing up as a demon from the earliest age. The double
source here for the basis of Lavina and Wilbur Whateley seems
obvious. The name of Wilbur seems to be Lovecrafts obvious nod to
the place name of Wilbraham.
3. The Unnamable (1923): has a passing mention of Miniters local
folklore about windows, heard prior to his 1928 visit.
4. The Trap (1931): has, I argue, a more central use of Miniters local
folklore about windows.73
71 Stated in a Lovecraft letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by
David Shultz.
72 The story based on the real Moll Pitcher of Marblehead, witch daughter of wizard Edward
Dimond, some of the facts of which were also known to Lovecraft.
73 With Henry S. Whitehead. See my detailed exploration of this in my essay on the story, to be
found in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: a third collection (2012), on pages 85-88. Of a 1923
visit to Mrs. Miniter Lovecraft wrote
74 But this cannot be the source, unless Lovecraft had perhaps heard of it earlier from Mrs.
Miniter. Since Colour had been written and published by the time of his actual visit to the
mountain. A Miniter source is possible, though, since she was apparently born on the mountain.
75 Lovecraft did see a little of the area to be flooded by Quabbin, since he travelled to the
North Wilbraham depot on...
a line which is doomed to go out of existence when the beautiful Swift River Valley
is flooded to make a reservoir for Boston. The scenery was very fine, though of course
I did not get so good a sight of it [as would have been possible by car] unpublished
letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by David Shultz.
76 Lovecraft was apparently invited for up to two weeks, but he recalled staying for only eight
days (S.T. Joshi states 29th June7th July 1928), as the stay was part of a summer tour of New
England sights and people.
72
A topographical map of 1892 marked with the exact location of the house, shown in relation
to Wilbraham and North Wilbraham and the Wilbraham Mountains. Four Corners is just off
my map, possibly an inspiration for the fictional Deans Corners in The Dunwich Horror.
73
The rounded Wilbraham Mountains, seen from Glendale Cemetery, 1983. Picture: Joe
Roberts. This is the only online colour photograph I have been able to find of the mountains,
and the land seems remarkably unphotographed for a locality of which Lovecraft says: The
country is very beautiful & traditional indeed, & undoubtedly represents the inland landscape
of Western New England at its best. In this mystery one is reminded of what Lovecraft
wrote of Dunwich: all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken down and that
despite its beauty there was no influx of artists to depict it.
here amid these long mountains was the Beebe house? Learning
Above: the Beebe house after her death, as a working farmhouse circa the 1940s.
The Denny Smith residence on Monson Road... At one time the home was owned by
Evanore Beebe [] Because of the many large maple trees, she called the home Maplehurst.
From: Wilbraham by Coralie M. Gray, Arcadia Publishing, 2001.
75
The Beebe house and barns, seen today on the satellite photography of Google Maps.
Unpaved avenue of trees from the Beebe house, seemingly running to the Glendale Road.
77 Lovecraft letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by David
Shultz.
78 Lovecraft does not mention such a visit in the texts to which I have access. But it would
have been unseemly of him to have digressed on this matter in his memoir of Mrs Miniter, if she
had not actually accompanied him on a visit to the Whale Rock.
79
Whale Rock in spring. Photo: Wilbraham Open Space and Recreation Plan Committee.
Size comparison. Photo: Wilbraham Open Space and Recreation Plan Committee.
kim) may have carved Indian soapstone bowl dishes from fragments of the
rock. This is possible, as there was a (then unexcavated) traditional Indian
stone bowl quarry in the north of the mountains, a little way north from the
Whale Rock across the valley stream.80 Since the Whale Rock is illustrated
in The History of Wilbraham, and as it was only a few miles north from their
home, the ladies would likely have known of it. Indeed Mrs Miniter, then
aged 59, could evidently still hike trails, since Lovecraft wrote that she
takes long rural walks [and that] one day Mrs. Miniter
shewed me a deep, mute ravine beyond the Randolph Beebe house,
along whose far-off wooded floor an unseen stream trickles in eternal
shadow.
Miniter also took Lovecraft on a delightful Saturday morning walking trip
to the north of the house, and one wonders if this was possibly in search of
the Whale Rock? The retinue included an adventurous cat, Old Fats
Saturday better weather enabled me to take a walk through some
of the picturesque country to the north, Mrs. Miniter serving as
guide whilst both dogs & one of the cats acted as a quadrupedal
retinue. I never before saw a cat which followed persons over hill &
dale like a dog. 81
There are of course numerous such giant glacial boulders in New England,
any one of which may put the Lovecraftian scholar in mind of the tablelike and sinister altar-like stone on the summit of Sentinel Hill in
Lovecrafts story The Dunwich Horror. However, S.T. Joshi clearly gives
Wilbraham Mountain as the likely inspiration for Sentinel Hill.82
80 William S. Fowler, The Wilbraham stone bowl quarry, Massachusetts Archaeological Society
Bulletin Vol.30, No.3-4, pp.9-21, 1972. W.J. Howes, Indian Soapstone Quarries of Western
Massachusetts (Westfield and Wilbraham), Mass. Archeological Society Bulletin, Vol.5, No.4,
July 1944.
81 From a Lovecraft letter to his aunt Lillian, 1st July 1928, kindly supplied in transcript by
David Shultz. Other letters also indicate she and Lovecraft took long hikes during the visit.
82 S.T. Joshi, The annotated H.P. Lovecraft , Dell, 1997, p.114. I agree with Joshi, but have also
found that there is another hill in Wilbraham that has or had a notable boulder on top. In 1864
Rufus Phineas Stebbins noted two fine paintings of key Wilbraham scenes, and in a description of
79
while imagined as far grander and statelier than that of Beebe, has much the
same situation as the Beebe house. To me this suggests Derleth may have
the second painting he refers tantalizingly to The boulder perched upon the hill back of the
house of J. Wesley Bliss Esq. See: Rufus Phineas Stebbins, An Historical Address delivered at the
Centennial Celebration of the Incorporation of the Town of Wilbraham, Jan. 15, 1863. With an Appendix,
Boston, 1864. I have not been able to discover the name of the hill Stebbins refers to.
83
84
Ibid.
80
actually located and visited the Beebe house in search of lost Lovecraft
letters. His story was the horror tale The Peabody Heritage (1957), one of
Derleths lesser posthumous collaborations with Lovecraft. S.T. Joshi states
it is almost entirely Derleths own work. An online video critique by Wilum
Pugmire states the story to be based on Entry 142 in Lovecrafts
Commonplace Book, merged together with many elements directly borrowed
from Lovecrafts The Dreams in the Witch House.85 The Peabody
Heritage was widely read during the Lovecraft revival of the 1960s and 70s,
in the popular paperback titled The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Horror.
Wilum Pugmire, YouTube video, book critique, posted online 20th March 2011.
86 To be found online and in Robert M. Price, Tales out of Dunwich, Hippocampus Press, 2004.
It has been called... perhaps his best story and it is certainly memorable.
Stanley C. Sargents The Black Brat of Dunwich, August Derleths The Watchers Out of
Time (based on a Lovecraft fragment), and Wilum Pugmires Sinless Infancy, among others.
87
81
W three, visible directly across from the Beebe house (see the
topographical map with this essay). Like Sentinel Hill in The Dunwich
Horror the Wigwam Hill peak played a major religious role in the locality,
due to the building there of the towns church meeting house. This project
was organized in 1741 and, after years of tedious debate, the church was
finally built at the top of the peak. The first meeting was held there 25th Dec
1747.89 Note that 1747 is the same date that is given by Lovecraft in The
Dunwich Horror for the preaching of the warning sermon
In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the
Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable
sermon
This 1747 date and the phrase newly come suggest that Wilbrahams
history, as well as its folklore and topography, was precisely incorporated into
the story. Lovecraft had probably heard such exact historical details from
Miss Beebe, or had read them in her personal local history library.
All this might seem to indicate Wigwam Hill as being the peak among the
three high peaks of the Wilbraham Mountains most likely to approximate to
the inspiration for Lovecrafts fictional Sentinel Hill.
88 Wigwam Hill is so named because an American Indian woman of the area, We-sha-u-gan of
the Nipmuc tribe, lived there alone in a wigwam for many years after the white man came
(History of Wilbraham, 1863). We-sha-u-gan appears to have been the last surviving Indian of the
region, and possibly chose the spot because it had been a traditional campground for her people.
For a history of the local Indian people see the exhibition notes for Old Meeting House Native
American Exhibit which are freely available online at
www.wilbrahamatheneum.org/pdf/NipmucIndians.pdf
A fatal case of rattlesnake bite in 1761 on the next-door Rattlesnake Peak (later given the more
enticing name of Mount Vision) in the Wilbraham Mountains gave rise to the ballad Springfield
Mountain. This is said to be one of the first noted down folk ballads... of which both words
and melody are believed to be indigenous to America. Lovecraft mentioned it in his letters from
Wilbraham, so knew of it.
These two facing peaks of the Wilbraham Mountains thus offer to each other a poignant
historical mirror, reflecting two ways of life the old one dying and the new one being born.
89
The building was later removed and taken down to the town in 1794.
82
A letter from Lovecraft also recalls the view from roads near the top
The road winds mystically aloft into a region of hushed skiedmeadow-land, seemingly half apart from time and change, and
abounding in breath-taking vistas. Through the haze of distance
other mountains loom purple and mysterious. A line of fog marks
the great Connecticut, and the smoke of Springfield clouds the
southwestern horizon. Sometimes even the gold dome of the
Hartford state house, far to the south, can be discerned.90
There is a vivid 1864 description of the view from the top of Wigwam Hill,
which indicates its importance to the local people. It is a view which
Lovecraft and Mrs. Miniter could still have enjoyed in the summer of 1928...
As they went up to worship [i.e.: the village going to the meeting
house on top of Wigwam Hill], the land lay spread out before them.
From its door the whole valley of the Great River, from the
mountains on the north, Holyoke and Tom, to below Hartford on
the south, was visible. The open fields of the first settlers of Burt
and Hitchcock and Brewer and Warriner and Merrick were under
their feet; and on to the west, over forests and meadows, could be
seen the blue line of vapor, signalizing the homes of the old settlers
in Springfield Street; or the white cloud of fog, lying low along the
tree-tops, indicating the course of the river from its gateway between
the mountains to the settlement at Middletown. And beyond, more
than twenty miles away, rose the blue ridges of the Green
Mountains, tipped with gold in the morning, veiled in purple in the
evening; and when the frosts touched the forest in autumn, how the
red maple flamed among the trees; and the green of the pines and
the yellow of the walnut caused the whole vast landscape to appear
like a gorgeous carpet woven in the loom of the gods.91
90
Rufus Phineas Stebbins, An Historical Address delivered at the Centennial Celebration of the
Incorporation of the Town of Wilbraham, Jan. 15, 1863. With an Appendix, Boston, 1864. pp.55-56.
91
83
Exhibition One
On the women writers and folklorists of Wilbraham: Miniter / Beebe /
Dowe and any others known locally:
1. Photos of Beebe and Miniter and the house and her collection. With
maps, and illustrated information boards for the kids about the Beebe houses
curious cats-ladders.
2. The local folklore which fascinated Miniter and Beebe (and later
Lovecraft). Perhaps accompanied by photographs of the local fireflies noted
so vividly by Lovecraft. A poetic comparison might be made between the
fleeting nature of the fireflies and the fleeting fragility of folklore / the
historical details of the fabric of womens lives. I note that the acclaimed
American photographer Gregory Crewsdon published a marvelously gothic
book of his photographs of fireflies at night. These and the folklore noted in
my essay would serve to link the first part of the exhibition to the mood of
the second part on H.P. Lovecraft and his use of Wilbraham in fiction.
3. A push-button audio reading of Lovecrafts fine essay on his memories
of Mrs Miniter, voiced by a local actor.
4. Copies of the 1913 history book of Wilbraham for which Beebe was the
secretary (and which Bowles suggests she more than half wrote).
5. Miniters local novel and its unpublished sequel (outline and fragments).
Also her other two unpublished novels (Lydia n Gerald, and The Village
Green),92 and some of her best poetry.
6. Information boards about Miniter and about what the amateur
journalism movement was, and the publishing outlets open to intelligent
women circa 1890s-1920s. Photographs of Lovecraft etc.
92
Exhibition Two
Following the first: Lovecraft and Wilbraham and The Dunwich Horror:
1. The handwritten manuscript (if extant) or typescript of The Dunwich
Horror (or a partial facsimile, if the insurance cost would be too high) from
Brown University.
2. An infographic showing visually how Lovecrafts various sources came
together to make the story.
3. A facsimile of Lovecafts 1st July 1927 letter from Wilbraham (ms. at
Brown University). Maybe together with extracts with the Lovecraft letters
to Galpin and Barlow which mention the second visit.
4. A copy of the novel A Mirror for Witches, by Esther Forbes, which
Lovecraft read during his Wilbraham visit and which partly inspired The
Dunwich Horror. The novel is set in New England, and being relevant to
the role of women in society it links to the first part of the exhibition.
85
5. Selected pages from Alan Moores forthcoming major graphic novel (due
2014), representing the later works inspired by the settings in Lovecrafts
works. Alan Moore, the world-famous graphic novelist, has announced that
he is to set his very substantial forthcoming Lovecraftian work Providence,
1919 substantially at Athol circa 1919. I would guess also at the Quabbin
reservoir area between Athol and Wilbraham, well known as the inspiration
and likely setting for Lovecrafts masterpiece The Colour Out of Space.
Moore says in the interview...
Ive been accumulating a huge wedge of reference material relating
to the town of Athol in Massachusetts. I know more about Athol
than probably people living there do. Weve got the entire history of
the town, its current situation, maps from different periods I am
doing my best to make this absolutely authentic.
Perhaps these graphic novel pages could be accompanied by some of the
many illustrations and comic book art that depict The Dunwich Horror of which Santiago Carusos work is the most accomplished Ive seen.
6. Newly commissioned gothic-style b&w art photos of local places which
served to inspire Lovecrafts famous story: the Bears Den at Athol; Wigwam
Hill in the Wilbraham Mountains; the abandoned avenue of trees opposite
the Beebe house; the huge barn at the back of the Beebe house; the site of
the ruined Randolph Beebe house if still existing; the whippoorwills of the
story; the Whale Rock near the Beebe house; the Devils Hop Yard barren
blasted area of Wilbraham Mountains (if it can still be found); any spooky
long covered bridges in the area still existing. Perhaps a local university
might set second-year photography students this task, as an assessed
assignment in Visualising the American Gothic or some such? And then
this could be paired with an open local photography competition.
7. A local supernatural story-telling competition inspired by the newly
commissioned photography, etc.
8. Photographs of Lovecraft etc. An audio reading of the story.
86
1 Abijah is Hebrew and means my father is God or the will of the Lord. It was a common
early name in New England.
2 A prominent writer of Lovecrafts beloved eighteenth century, whom Pope could praise as a
stylist in the same breath as he praised Swift. Although in other respects Pope opposed
Hoadley... The deliberate, unimpassioned hostility of Pope, and the misanthropic virulence of
Swift, against Bishop Hoadley... (The works of Alexander Pope, 1847). Hoadley is now remembered
online via old encyclopaedias for his role in the tedious and long-running theological Bangorian
Controversy but the first scholarly modern book on him appeared in 2004 and positioned him
as a key Enlightenment figure. Not to be confused with his playwright son of the same name.
3
Ellis Sandoz, Political Sermons of the American Founding Era. Vol.1 (1730-1788), 1991.
87
4 Catechism: meaning a series of fixed questions and answers which are learned, and by which
others can be swiftly argued into a new belief.
5 Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul : Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England,
Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.240-241. Second Edition.
6 Lovecrafts lifelong affection for and allegiance to all things English, which astounded his
grandfather and aunts when he denounced the American Revolution as early as 1896. from
Books At Brown special Lovecraft edition, 1991. In the year or so prior to summer 1928, Lovecraft
had been conducting a detailed study of the history of London.
7 In S.T. Joshi (Ed.), H.P. Lovecraft, four decades of criticism, Ohio State University Press, 1980,
p.177.
88
influences. I came across some of the details of this while researching the
lost Lovecraft correspondent George FitzPatrick,1 who was a resident of
Australia. I wondered if FitzPatrick could have told Lovecraft of a rather
suitable Sydney publication for placing his work or for gaining revision
clients
Smiths Weekly (Sydney) was an Australian tabloid newspaper
published from 1919 to 1950. An independent weekly [weekend]
published in Sydney, but read all over Australia, Smiths Weekly was
one of Australias most patriotic newspaper-style magazines. [...]
Mainly directed at the male market, it mixed sensationalism, satire
and controversial opinions with sporting and finance news. It also
included short stories [...] It was a launching pad for two generations
of outstanding Australian journalists and cartoonists. Three rare
Lovecraftian stories were originally published by the well-known
Witch of the Cross in Sydney, Rosaleen Norton in Smiths Weekly.
(My emphasis).
1 See the essay elsewhere in this book, Geo. FitzPatrick of Sydney: Lovecrafts lost Australian
correspondent.
89
In 1995 these three stories were republished as Three Macabre Stories by R.T.
Risk in the form of a pamphlet of only 150 copies,2 and this item may have
escaped the notice of Lovecraftians since the original 1934 date of
publication for the stories was omitted in the blurb, and no reviews of it
appeared online. It was later republished as Three Macabre Stories in an
expanded hardcover edition of 666 hardcover copies by the occultist Teitan
Press in 2010,3 when it went similarly unremarked by Lovecraftians.
These three stories were written when Rosaleen Norton (1917-1979)4 was
aged only 15, 5 and they were all published in short order in 1934. They
undoubtedly show a strong Lovecraft influence. It thus occurred to me: was
Rosaleen Norton a previously unrecognised correspondent of Lovecraft circa
1933/4? Did she even perhaps have some revision suggestions or plot
prompts from Lovecraft? It does seem curious that such a young girl could
have enough budding literary talent to have three paid stories published in a
row, acclaimed by local editors and of near-professional standard, but then
did not publish anything more in the line of fiction during her entire life
even shortly after 1934 when she very badly needed the money.6 Other
2 Rosaleen Norton, Three Macabre Stories, R.T. Risk 1995. Again under the same publishers
Typographeum imprint, 1996.
3
For scholarly work on Norton see: Nevill Stuart Drury, Rosaleen Nortons Contribution to
the Western Esoteric Tradition, thesis for University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia,
2008 (her fiction being covered on pages 19-20, mostly drawing heavily on previous writing on
the stories). The thesis was later published in Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies
No.5, 2009-11. A fuller biography of Norton was published in 2013: Nevill Drurys Pan's
Daughter: The Magical World of Rosaleen Norton. The latter presumably draws heavily on his thesis,
and might be similar to his book of 2010 title Homage to Pan: The Life, Art and Sex-magic of Rosaleen
Norton. There are also books on Norton which concentrate on her later highly accomplished
macabre occult art. She left an unfinished autobiography, Thorn in the Flesh, but only as fragments.
Since this autobiography has been published, it presumably did not mention Lovecraft or else we
would have heard about it by now.
4
Norton apparently shortly afterwards started making a bare living as a teenage art model for
life drawing, with sidelines as a kitchen maid and waitress.
6
90
aspects of her circumstances in 1934 allow me to argue that she may have
written to Lovecraft seeking advice as a writer. Judging by her stories she
was a Lovecraft fan, and Lovecraft was keen to help the young and female
with serious revision work. In the last years of his life he gathered many
young aspiring correspondents, many of them budding weird fiction writers.
Smiths Weekly banner. The magazine might be looked at (probably after April 1926)
over an approx. ten year period, during which there might have been small-ads or
short letters notifying readers of Lovecrafts revision services? 7
Rosaleen Nortons short stories for Smiths Weekly are, in order of their
publication: The Story of the Waxworks (haunted museum); The Painted
Horror (demonic portrait); and Moon Madness (vampire murderess).
In this regard I note that, following a 1939 ban on American pulps, the domestic market for
stories boomed...
most Australians do not realise the extent of the Australian pulp fiction industry
during the 1940s and 1950s Toni Johnson-Woods, Pulp: A Collector's Book of
Australian Pulp Fiction Covers, 2004.
It thus seems strange that Norton did not take advantage of this captive domestic market.
James Doigs Australian Gothic: An Anthology of Australian Supernatural Fiction (2007, 2013) was able
to unearth a vibrant past market from the 1930s to the 1950s containing
a rare and compelling collection of Australian horror classics that have remained
largely undisturbed in the pages of old books and periodicals
7 For the benefit of those following up these leads, I note that there was a substantial 258-page
history of Smiths Weekly published by G. Blaikie in 1966.7 The State Library of New South Wales
holds the complete microfilm archives of Smiths Weekly from 1919-1950, a microfilm which does
not seem to be available commercially or as online scans. The Oxford Companion to Australian
Literature called the title
an uninhibited Sydney newspaper which won an overseas reputation for its raciness
and for the quality of its black-and-white art
It was regrettably also notable for its constantly anti-Jewish attitudes before 1945. Yet both its
raciness and its racism might however have endeared the title to Lovecraft as a possible source of
revision clients, especially as their attitudes would have sat well with his own pro-British and racist
worldview.
91
8 Nevill Stuart Drury, Rosaleen Nortons Contribution to the Western Esoteric Tradition,
thesis for University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, 2008. Drury has no current
interest in her early fiction.
92
had the look of one who had seen things mortals should not see.
(from The Story of the Waxworks)9
This is competent but seems somewhat flat. But Norton was then invited by
Smiths Weekly to submit more work
After receiving her first submission Marien invited Norton to
submit another short story, and she sent in a piece titled The Painted
Horror, a tale even more disturbing than the first.10
I have read her second story, The Painted Horror (published 27th Jan
1934), and it appears to show a stronger influence from Lovecraft both in its
title, theme, and style. Drury11 noted that it features
a young artist who, while painting in his garret, noticed his hand
being mysteriously guided into painting
a gigantic, sickening mass of purplish, bloated flesh,
looking as if it had risen from a sea of corruption, topped by
a squat, leering, half-human head, and great, thick, bloodbedabbled fingers like writhing worms The vast hulk
crouched on the canvas ready to spring. (from The Painted
Horror).
This mysterious force fed upon the artists mind and soul and then,
one morning, he was discovered on his studio floor torn to pieces
and chewed. A policeman who found the bizarre death impossible
9 It may be better than it sounds here, since it was included in James Doig (Ed.), Australian
Nightmares: More Australian Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Equilibrium Books, 2008. Also in the
budget Wordsworth anthology Australian Ghost Stories (2010). Judging by the comprehensive
listing of anthology contents on the Australian Horror Writers Association website, this is the
only story Norton has had included in Australian themed anthologies.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
93
to solve noted: Funny the way a big canvas in his studio had a great
hole in it, as if something had jumped right out of it, or through it.12
The sophistication of style, and the use of the likes of blood-bedabbled,
certainly intrigued me, and the extract certainly sounds as if Lovecraft could
have written it. Indeed it even reminded me strongly of Lovecrafts lost
juvenile tale called The Picture (1907)13
Of [the story] The Picture (1907) HPL [Lovecraft] remarks: I
had a man in a Paris garret paint a mysterious canvas embodying the
quintessential essence of all horror. He is found clawed & mangled
one morning before his easel. The picture is destroyed, as in a titanic
strugglebut in one corner of the frame a bit of canvas remains &
on it the coroner finds to his horror the painted counterpart of the
sort of claw which evidently killed the artist (Letters to Robert Bloch,
Necronomicon Press, 1993, p.15). The [lost] story seems to
anticipate Pickmans Model (1926).14
So a key question here about her story The Painted Horror is: how could a
15 year old girl in Australia in 1934 know about a destroyed Lovecraft story
from 1907? A tale now only known to Lovecraftians today through a single
substantial source, the Bloch letter. A letter not published until 1975.15
12
Ibid.
13 I have since found that this source was actually noted in passing by Kirsti Sarmiala-Berger in
2001, but she does not appear to have realised that the Lovecraft story was lost...
The idea for one of these stories, 'The Painted Horror', was directly taken from The
Picture (1907) from Kirsti Sarmiala-Berger , Rosaleen Norton: A Painter of
Occult and Mystical Pictures, Overland magazine, Autumn 2001, pp. 59-63.
Sarmiala-Berger also apparently did not realise that Norton was very unlikely to have been able to
know about The Picture (1907) in 1934.
14 S.T. Joshi and David E. Shultz, The Lovecraft Encyclopaedia, Hippocampus 2001, p.133.
Elsewhere in this volume the date of the letter is given: 1st June 1933. Bloch promptly wrote a
version of the story himself.
15 As far as I can tell the Lovecraft letter to Bloch mentioning The Picture was first
published in L. Sprague De Camps groundbreaking Lovecraft: A Biography in 1975.
94
There are several logical possibilities for how she might have known:
i.
ii.
iii.
Bloch was corresponding with her, and sent her the details
of The Picture which he had from Lovecraft in the letter of
1st June 1933.17 Unlikely. Bloch was almost exactly the same
age as Norton, but even then he was an ambitious
professional and he might have felt he was betraying
Lovecrafts creative and professional confidence by casually
divulging details of an early story to another youth. Besides
it appears that he had almost immediately written up a
version of the story himself (presumably with Lovecrafts
permission) as The Madness of Lucian Grey, for
publication.18 He is unlikely to have shared a finished
16
So far as I know this was first published in 1938 by The Futile Press.
17 Bloch would likely have mentioned it to someone after Lovecrafts death, and Norton would
later have recalled corresponding with Bloch after he became a famous name with Psycho.
18 The story is now lost. Blochs circa June 1933 story The Madness of Lucian Grey was
written, revised by Lovecraft and accepted by Marvel Tales, but was apparently never published
under his name (although I read that he sometimes used pseudonyms, such as Tarleton Fiske)
and S.T. Joshi gives it as lost...
19 How might Norton have known of his work? Presumably by reading imports of Weird Tales?
Did Weird Tales reach Australia in 1933-34? Leigh Blackmore has an unpublished draft on Weird
Tales in Australia (1992) in his bibliography, but it is not available online. It appears, judging
from his summary of it, to focus on the post-war period...
Brief history of wartime shortages and bans, which made the pulp magazine difficult
to obtain here. Unfinished; need to track down older SF fans to discuss their memories
(Graham Stone etc).
This implies that the magazine may have been easier to obtain in the 1930s in Australia. The
American pulps were banned in Australia, via the Customs (Literature Censorship) Regulations
1937, but only from 1939 or 1940 (sources differ on the date it came into effect)...
In 1939 the Australian government had established tariffs on American imports that
effectively banned American pulps from Tony Johnson-Woods, The Mysterious
Case of Carter Brown, in Whos Who?: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian
Literature, University of Queensland Press, p.74.
Such a banning implies that the import trade in American pulps was a flourishing one in the
Australia of the 1930s. Since Sydney was the capital city, copies might not have been difficult for
Norton to purchase or swop for.
The other alternative was that she read Lovecraft in the Not at Night anthology book series. But
by 1934 this had only carried The Rats in the Walls, Pickman's Model", and The Horror at
Red Hook, and would not have provided an address to write fan letters to.
20 Her name and address are not on his list of correspondents. Lovecraft had a number of
youthful admirers late in his life
in the last four years of his life he attracted a substantial number of young people
(mostly boys) who looked upon him as a living legend from S.T. Joshi, I Am
Providence, Hippocampus, 2010, p.866.
Not all of these got into the address book that we have via the Robert Barlow transcription of it.
Helen V. Sully is missing from it, for instance.
96
v.
Having read the story in question I suspect that hypothesis IV is the most
likely.
Her story The Painted Horror has several long sections in italics,
something not at all required by the nature of the story, almost as if Norton
was covering herself by identifying sections that were not written by her or
had been heavily revised by someone else. These odd italicised sections are:
One winter evening a few years ago, a man was to be seen walking
slowly up the main street of a Sydney suburb. With suspicious
regularity, every person that he passed turned round and stared at
him. And small wonder, for the man was like a walking corpse. His
face was ghastly pale and haggard; his bloodless lips twitched
nervously as he walked, and his hands kept up a similar trembling
until he could scarcely hold his walking stick. But his eyes! They
21 At that time she was still living at home, and could have had the money to pay Lovecraft
from her mother. More likely is that Lovecraft did not expect any payment until after publication
when dealing with revisions and guidance for young people of raw talent, as was his usual
approach.
97
were the eyes of one who has passed through hell, and is almost
crazed by the memory of the things he has seen or heard.
[]
The flabby, drooling lips, half-open in a grin of demoniac glee,
disclosing four blunt decaying tusks, and the little abnormal twisted
ears set well back on the travesty of a head. And the malignant way
the last bulk of it crouched on the canvas, ready to spring at its prey.
God! The whole impression was one of slimy living rottenness. It
was like one of those pale things that scuttle away when you lift up a
stone that has been embedded ill the earth; only magnified many
thousands of times.
[]
At night, I try to keep awake, but it is useless. I fall asleep and
wake with that unearthly fear. It haunts me. Wherever I go I feel its
evil soul following me, whispering unthinkable horrors in my ear,
until I imagine I am going mad.
98
99
Selected Letters III, 1929-1931, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei wrote
of that period
The old family-owned stone quarry in East Providence became
exhausted and the income from it came to an end.
An article in the Books at Brown special Lovecraft issue (1991) noted that
Lovecraft visited in 1927 when he
delighted in showing his friends over the small Providence quarry
operated by the De Magistris
The quarry was run by an Italian manager Mariano de Magistris, and his
Americanized son who owned a roadster car. The name of their business
was the Providence Crushed Stone & Sand Co., located at Violet Hill,
Manton Ave.
C.E. Millers book Rhode Island Minerals and Their Locations (1971)2
describes the quarry thus
Providence: Manton or Violet Hill Quarry. This quarry, formerly
operated by the Providence Crushed Stone and Sand Company, is
one of Rhode Islands famous mineral hunting grounds of the
past
This is might appear to imply it was still accessible to mineralogists in the
1970s, but another book by Miller suggests it was then long closed as a
working quarry.
C.E. Millers book Minerals of Rhode Island (1972)3 lists the Manton quarry
as
A bluestone quarry located at Manton near Providence. Closed
1941. George English described the foliated talc from here as the
best in the USA.
Miller, C.E., Rhode Island Minerals and Their Locations, University of Rhode Island, 1971.
Miller, C.E. (ed. O. Don Hermes), Minerals of Rhode Island, University of Rhode Island, 1972.
(This appears to be an edited or abridged or handbook version of Millers 1971 book?)
3
100
Other names for the place appear, found during my online searches, to
have been: Manton Quarry; Manton Avenue Quarry; and Violet Hill
Quarry.
The American Mineralogist journal described it as being a pit quarry and
geologically speaking, of a very complex nature. At Manton a
quarry is located the rock of which is used for road material.
Inasmuch as quarrying operations have produced a pit the geological
and mineralogical problems can therefore be studied in considerable
detail. [...] With the continuance of the [quarry] operations minerals
new to the area have been uncovered.4
In 1926 the American Mineralogist journal gave5 a complete list of the rocks
and minerals found there, to which I have appended a slightly later published
list of new finds6 made as the quarry was dug deeper
4
5
6
102
For Titanite the quarry was said to be Excellent world class for
species7 The quarry certainly seems to have been a fine mineral resource
all round, many of them quite unusual or attractive one wonders if today it
might have given Lovecraft an income in the mail-order sale of small
polished samples sold to superstitious devotees of crystals.
Lovecrafts friend James F. Morton certainly used the quarry to get some of
the fine mineral samples, which were displayed at his outstanding Paterson
Museum collection.8 One sample taken was an unknown extra-heavy
mineral, which Morton promised to try to identify for the curious de
Magistris (and which one of Lovecrafts letters later reminded Morton
about)
Did you ever find out what that extra-heavy substance was that
you got off the quarry of my vassal, goodman Mariano de
Magistris?9
In relation to the quarry one might also note the geological and
mineralogical knowledge Lovecraft uses at the start of At The Mountains of
Madness (1931)
we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk
bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous
explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The preCambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed
our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with the great bulk of
the continent to the west [] In certain of the sandstones,
dynamited and chiselled after boring revealed their nature, we found
some highly interesting fossil markings and fragmentsnotably
7
8 Books at Brown journal, Lovecraft special issue, 1991. Morton, of the Paterson Museum in
New Jersey, is noted as a mineralogist in The Call of Cthulhu
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the Cthulhu
Cult, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local
museum and a mineralogist of note.
9
10 the entire upstairs floor being given over to his hall of minerals S.T. Joshi, H.P.
Lovecraft: a life, p.443.
11 See my other essay in this volume, The Terribly Nice Old Ladies: Miniter and Beebe at
Wilbraham.
104
Stilbite.
Lovecraft did visit other quarries in the state, albeit not regularly
I took a day off Tuesday to accompany James F. Morton (whose
name youve doubtless seen in amateur papers) on a geological trip
around this state collecting minerals for his museum in
Paterson.12
12
Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Hippocampus Press , 2008,
p.94
105
A likely schedule of places he and Morton might have visited that day, if in
and around Providence, is perhaps indicated by a 1936 account of a trip to
Providence by the New England Intercollegiate Geologic Excursion
The twentieth annual New England Intercollegiate Geologic
Excursion was held in the vicinity of Providence, October 10 and 11
[] McCormicks quarry where fossil ferns and calamites occur in
the Seekonk sandstones and conglomerates. [] Lime Rock, a
locality famous for its contact metamorphic minerals [] a graphite
mine at Rocky hill [] A study was made of the cuspate bar and
folded clays near a submerged cedar swamp excited considerable
discussion [] an ancient Indian soapstone quarry at Ochee spring
was studied [] at the North Burial Ground where an esker of
problematic relations was of interest to all.
There were certainly curious sights to be had on such visits. Here is a rather
evocatively weird stone egg photographed before 1908 at another quarry on
Rhode Island
106
Lovecrafts quarry was easily reached by the Manton Ave. trolley car,
noted the American Mineralogist journal in 1920, giving its exact location on
Cortez St. and Manton Ave.. The vital and unique mention of Cortez
St. makes it easy to locate on the Google Maps service. It appears that the
quarry has today been land filled, and new apartments or office recently built
on it
One might also note the imagined form of a quarry in The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath (1927), and further note that the tale was written in the
same year as his own quarry visits...
there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; from which
had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks
that the sight of their chiselled vacancies struck terror to all who
beheld. Who had mined those incredible blocks, and whither they
had been transported, no man might say; but it was thought best not
to trouble that quarry, around which such inhuman memories might
conceivably cling. So it was left all alone in the twilight, with only
the raven and the rumoured Shantak-bird to brood on its
immensities
[Carter visits the quarry] The path indeed led straight ahead and
slightly down, with the same lines of high natural walls as before; but
on the left hand there opened out a monstrous space, vast acres in
extent, where some archaic power had riven and rent the native cliffs
of onyx in the form of a giants quarry. Far back into the solid
precipice ran that Cyclopean gouge, and deep down within earths
bowels its lower delvings yawned. It was no quarry of man, and the
concave sides were scarred with great squares, yards wide, which told
of the size of the blocks once hewn by nameless hands and chisels.
High over its jagged rim huge ravens flapped and croaked, and vague
whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less
mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness. The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
108
should have known that the key garrison of Britain was the second Augustan
legion?3 The investigation of this seemingly small problem in Lovecrafts
work has actually been rather fruitful. It has led me to strong and clear
evidence for a new key source for The Rats in the Walls.4 It has also
enabled me to place the location of the storys inspiration in Northumbria.
See the end section of this essay for a full tallying of this new source.
Cybele was a matriarch mother figure and probably the first of the non-Roman mystery cults
to be introduced into the Roman world. Closely associated with the Phrygian sacred mountain
called Dindymon, which was personified as a daemon. Historically, the date of the introduction
5
109
Nikolas Davies, et al (2008), Dictionary of Architecture and Building Construction, Routledge, p. 64.
Castrum means a cutting off or a severance, hence a Roman station that is cut off
from the surrounding land and peoples. Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of
Modern English, 1977, Routledge, p.436.
8
9 Lovecraft had discovered Machen in the Spring of 1923, according to S.T. Joshis Lovecraft
Encyclopaedia. Key Machen fictional works are based around Caerleon-on-Usk in South Wales,
which in Roman times was the main British headquarters of the second Augustan legion. The
Hadrians Wall area, on the opposite side of the British Isles, would have been a natural and
equally haunted alternative choice for Lovecraft. I note that J.M. Rajala has already mentioned
this possible explanation of avoiding Machens settings, given in passing in his essay Locked
Dimensions Out of Reach: The Lost Stories of H.P. Lovecraft, in the Lovecraft Annual 2011.
10
that of Cybele. Later in the story he reveals that the rites had become
infected with those of Atys or Attis.11 In Classical literature Atys was a
mythical beautiful young adolescent12 swineherd,13 strongly associated with
madness and self-castration
The reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus14
and knew something of the hideous rites of the Eastern god, whose
worship was so mixed with that of Cybele. from Rats.
This reference to the perverted mixing of the two cults, and his hints at the
horrific nature of their rites, were both historically correct and at a later
point in the story this allows Lovecraft to plausibly switch the tracks from
the real history to his hints at
the antediluvian15 cult which the priests of Cybele found and
mingled with their own from Rats.
His earlier reference to the mythic swineherd also allows Lovecraft to
plausibly evoke the nightmare dream-vision of the grotto, and then the
allusion
No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit
grotto! from Rats.
Perhaps there is even an intended link between Atys and the final reference
to the mysterious flute-players in the deep earth. Since the swineherds and
11
12
Famous Roman poet. See: Catullus 63, the Attis of Catullus. This is the first reference to
Attis in classical literature.
14
15
The word antediluvian meaning, from before the time of Noahs Flood.
111
112
19 A History of Northumberland (1840). The exact inscription is: The soldiers of the 2nd
Cavalry Regiment of Asturians restored this temple. They were from mountainous eastern
Asturia, and thus were deemed suitable for the damp and cold British climate. The Varduli from
a similarly mountainous part of Spain, namely the Basque country, were also present at the Wall.
These facts were known to English scholars from at least 1853, see: The Roman Wall: an historical
and topographical description (1853); and John McCaul, Britanno-Roman inscriptions (1863).
20 See the end of this essay for my summation and elaboration of the evidence. For Joshis
supposition, see S.T. Joshi (1997), The annotated H.P. Lovecraft, Dell, p.25. I might also note as
evidence for Hexham, this from Lovecrafts later The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (early
1927)...
the pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins of
Caerleon [in Wales] and Hexham, and by the towers along Hadrians crumbling wall
There is also further evidence making Hexham a likely choice, from Lovecafts letters...
My fathers parents - George Lovecraft of the line of Minster-Hall, near NewtonAbbot, Devon, and Helen Allgood, of the line of Nunwick, near Hexham,
Northumberland. [my emphasis] from Selected Letters II, p. 179. Lovecraft is here
recalling copying out his family-tree chart, circa 1905. Evidently, one of the roots of his
family tree was very near Hexham.
So his grandfather had married an Allgood, whose family came from very near Hexham.
Lovecraft was obsessed with his family-tree, especially the maternal lines. Therefore any material
such as a book chapter on Hexham (see Footnote 5) would have interested him. His great-aunt
(d. 1908, also an Allgood) collected material on the family tree, and there were: separate Allgood
notes (Selected Letters II, p.213) along with her paternal notes. He knew enough about the
Allgoods to note in his letters that: the head of the Allgood house in Northumberland seems
always to be High-Sheriff of the County, even to this day; a sort of hereditary manorial
appurtenance (Selected Letters II, p.99).
21 The name Hexham clearly given as Exham Priory, Northumberland in the Rev. John
Curtis (1831), A Topographical History of the County of Leicester
113
Roman stones in the crypt and fabric of the Priory, states that an even earlier
history of Hexham had wrongly supposed
the Verones of Vettones, a people of Spain, as the [Roman]
garrison of Hexham, and [the earlier historian, Hutchinson in 1778,
misleadingly] calls Camden to his aid, who says that a cohort of
Spaniards was stationed at Hexham.22
22 Arthur Biggs Wright (1823), Roman Remains, in An Essay Towards a History of Hexham,
p.125.
114
The 1911 Britannica was of course much used by Lovecraft, as S.T. Joshi has shown.
24 It seems the ruined city was a quarry for many local crypts and foundations, as a Roman
gravestone also turns up in the crypt of nearby Dilston Castle. On this, see Footnote 6.
25
26
115
116
Isles. Gaelic was spoken only in the far north, i.e. north of Hadrians Wall, while Cymric was at
that time spoken in all of the rest of the main island. A Briton thus described a speaker of
Cymric, i.e: those who lived anywhere to the south of Hadrians Wall...
There can be no doubt that the inhabitants of both this kingdom [Wales], and that of
the tambriana to the south of Hadrians Wall, spoke Welsh [i.e. Cymric] from
George Perkins Marsh, Lectures on the English language, Murray, 1880, p.43.
It seems clear that southern Britain, in the context of Roman Britain in the 200s (and in the
context of Lovecrafts historical knowledge in the 1920s), meant anywhere south of Hadrians
Wall. The Romans never retreated south of the Wall until they finally left Britain.
117
Dilston Castle [in ruins], with the Bridge over the Devils Water, Formerly the
seat of the unfortunate James [Ratcliffe] Earl of Derwentwater.
118
Lovecraft was broadly correct on Lindum. This was Lindum Colonia, now
the modern town of Lincoln in Lincolnshire although it was believed to
have started life as an encampment of the 9th Legion Hispania (from Spain),
later replaced by the British second Augustan legion.33
It is just possible to read this part of The Descendant as implying that it
is only Lunaeus Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan
Legion who is at Lindum, perhaps on a secondment to the second Augustan
legion, from the third. As suggested in the first part of this essay, there were
certainly a good many Spanish soldiers on Hadrians Wall.34 There is also
some slim published justification from Lovecrafts time, for the idea of
secondments
The Third Augustan Legion was sent to Africa and for three
centuries Africa was its home. In times of stress it was reinforced by
drafts from other legions, including even the legions stationed in
Britain; or it would send out drafts to remote parts of the Empire. It
is recorded that there were Moors35 serving in the garrison along the
33 Lind, or Lincoln, which is named Lindum in the Itinerary, Lindum Colonia, in the
Chorographia Anonymi Ravennatis, and Lindicolinum in Bede. Chronicles of the ancient British church
(1847), p.59.
If perhaps not many actual Arabs, due to their being generally unsuited to the harsh
northern British climate, although Lovecraft might not have known that in the 1920s.
34
35
i.e.: North African Arabs, although probably the author means the Spanish Astures.
119
36 This book seems just the sort of brisk and vividly evocative factual book that Lovecraft
would have liked, it shares his worldview, and it even has a chapter on the Old Gods such as
Baal.
37 This was... The Allgood line, from Northumberland, Selected Letters IV, p.339. See my
map, for the location in context.
38 As previously stated, this legion was stationed in south Wales, and drew its recruits largely
from the British Isles.
39 This is true despite the many fabulations and pseudo-scholarly gyrations of modern pagans.
For the best rigorously level-headed and fair scholarly account of what we do really know, see:
Ronald Hutton (1993), The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy.
120
iven this the many facts presented earlier in this essay, I can
firmly place The Rats in the Walls in northern England.
Specifically, in Northumbria. The fells of Northumbria
certainly seem more congruent with the sense of wild landscape surrounding
Exham Priory: the solid limestone of the precipice from whose brink the
priory overlooked a desolate valley and the barren, windswept valley
beneath the limestone cliff.
I have found six points of correspondence between Rats and the facts
given in the chapter Hexham And Its Neighbourhood, from the book
Highways and byways in Northumbria (1921). This chapter appears to be the
key source for Rats. Here are the points:
i. On the existence of cliffs like the precipice and cliff of the story, the
chapter states...
Nearer Hexham is the romantic reach of the river, flowing
between lofty cliffs called Swallowship.
ii. A precipice and large cave is detailed in a report of the Battle of
Hexham, while describing a place near the battlefield...
Deepdene [at Swallowship] a huge ravine, the banks of which fall
precipitously to the West Dipton burn [a burn is a fast upland
steam] which flows between them on its way to join the Devils
Water. [...] The cave on the West Dipton burn is said to be the place
where Margaret and Prince Edward were temporarily lodged by their
protector. It is 31 feet long and 14 feet broad, but scarcely high
enough to allow of a person standing upright. In the middle is a
massive pillar of rude masonry... (my emphasis)
Note the similarity to the large stone altar in the centre of the vault,
depicted in Rats.
iii. The same chapter also interestingly notes that one of the last extant
remnants of Aryton Castle, a fortified mansion of the fourteenth century
[now Aydon Castle], are...stone mangers to protect the dumb animals.
121
Again, note the similarity with the description in Rats of: stone pens, and
stone [food] bins, for the quadruped things.
iv. Of the neighbouring Dilston Castle, the article notes... the last Earl
[James Ratcliffe, Earl of Derwentwater] rode forth in 1715 and that... His
doom was written at his birth.
v. On the night the last Earl was executed...
over Dilstons melancholy tower, the red fingers of the Aurora
Borealis shot across the sky [after which] the castle was allowed to
go to ruin.
Lovecrafts use of the aurora in Rats is the clincher for this source, in my
mind, since in the story he describes twice... the faint auroral glow and
the... suspicion of aurora in the sky. The aurora (aka the Northern Lights)
was notable enough in the sky to be recorded in the literature of
Northumbria in 793, 1716, 1848, and 1869. It only very rarely appears in the
south of England.
Other sources tell that the actual name of this last Earl was James
Ratcliffe, of the family of Ratcliffe, which held Dilston. See the names
usage, for instance: in William Berrs Encyclopaedia Heraldic or complete
dictionary of heraldry, Volume 2 (1828); Stephen Whatleys Englands Gazetteer
(1751); and Thomas Roses Westmorland, Cumberland, Durham, and
Northumberland (1832). From the latter...
A name like Ratcliffe (rat / cliff) has an obvious relevance to The Rats in the
Walls. Note also that the Ratcliffe family later changed their name to the
prettier Radcliffe, which is not unlike the name change which Delapore
makes for himself in Rats.
vi. The book chapter also suggests a clear model for the idea of the later
restoration of the Dilston tower by a gentleman...
122
40
www.friendsofhistoricdilston.org
123
41
Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844 buys old
Free-Will Church in July his archaeological work & studies in
occult well known.
This implies 1843 as the date for the discovery in Egypt of the storys
Shining Trapezohedron. Lovecrafts invention of a native Rhode Island
Egyptologist, and use of the date of 1843 seem, upon some research, to
indicate a typical conflation by Lovecraft of two real people into one fictional
character. I can suggest that the first real person was Carl Richard Lepsius
(1810-1884, the father of modern Egyptology), and that the second was
Rhode Island Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour (1833-1896).
Researching these men had led me to other important insights into the
sources of The Haunter of the Dark.
Many of his books and papers had previously been in the library of Carl
Richard Lepsius, the father of modern Egyptology. So here we have was a
Rhode Island Egyptologist who could have inspired Lovecrafts fictional
Enoch Bowen. Yet Wilbour did not, so far as I can tell, engage in studies in
[the] occult as well as in Egyptology.2
It seems Wilbours legacy had faded from sight by the late 1920s / early
1930s, even among scholars on the East Coast. A learned article on him in
19323 felt it necessary to
bring to the fore the name of an American Egyptologist who
seems to be generally forgotten, I mean Charles Edwin Wilbour
But Lovecraft could have learned of him via a series of public lectures given
on Wilbour at The Brooklyn Museum in 1935, the final lecture being heavily
illustrated with projected slides. It was at the end of 1935 Lovecraft wrote
The Haunter of the Dark. The lecture series on Wilbour was printed in
The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, and these lectures were reported elsewhere.
So I speculate that one or other report of these lectures could have been how
Lovecraft learned that his beloved Rhode Island had once fathered a major
Egyptologist.
Of course, Lovecraft may also have visited The Charles Edwin Wilbour
Memorial Library Room in the Brooklyn Museum, while living in Brooklyn
in the mid 1920s, and may have read there a biographical information plaque
or similar.
I am also indebted to Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. for pointing out another
manner in which Lovecraft could have known of Wilbour. Brown University
has a Wilbour Hall,4 seen above, endowed by the wealthy Wilbour family in
2 In 1936 (which was after the writing of The Haunter of the Dark) the Museum also
published 600 pages of Wilbours letters, in two volumes. I wonder if a perusal of the index to
these might turn up some references to interest in the occult?
3
4 Formerly the Dorrance mansion; then the Delta Phi house at Brown; from 1939 a famous
mathematics research centre under Otto Neugebauer; and since 1949 the home of the
126
memory of Charles Edwin Wilbour. From this lead I have found that the
building was a fraternity house at the time Lovecraft was writing the story
[Fraternity] Delta Phi at Brown was first located in North Slater
dormitory and later moved to Wilbour Hall, which now houses
Browns Egyptology department.5
The Oracle: The Reference Manual of the Delta Phi Fraternity, p.45.
6 It seems that Amenemhet IIIs maze did indeed come before the Cretan Labyrinth in terms
of the chronology known in Lovecrafts time. The chapter on The Cretan Labyrinth in W. H.
Matthewss Mazes and Labyrinths (1922) states of the famous maze...
127
IIIs labyrinth is vast, and not the closed windowless crypt of an (implied
smaller?) temple, as stated in The Haunter of the Dark.
128
was in Saqara,9 the royal necropolis of the ancient city of Memphis. The
tombs of the vast city of Memphis are, of course, where Lovecrafts fiction
has it that all sorts of horrors and arcane secrets are to be found. See
especially the mention of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis in the story
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) and the subterranean secrets of
Memphis delved into by Abdul Alhazred in The History of the
Necronomicon (1927). After Lepsiuss recording of Mayas tomb in 1843 the
location of it was lost, until rediscovery by Geoffrey Martin in 1986.
Given that Mayas tomb decoration puts him face to face and of equal size
with the gods themselves, and that he wished to ascend to the stars and thus
become immortal, might there be a possibility of a loose link between Maya
and Lovecrafts Starry Wisdom sect? Indeed, the Egyptian star beliefs10 are
evidenced in Mayas donation to Tutankhamuns tomb of his own
remembrance item inscribed
The designation Temple for the upper part of this tomb is justified byA.J.
Spencer, Death in Ancient Egypt, (1982), pp.238-39.
9
G.A. Wainwright, The Sky-Religion in Egypt: Its Antiquity and Effects, Cambridge University
Press, 1938.
10
129
O Mother Nut [i.e., the night sky], spread thy wings over me as
[you do over] the Imperishable Stars [implied: so that I may be
placed among those Imperishable circumpolar stars and thus may
never die] 11
Here is Howard Carters actual 1922 on-site transcription of this phrase,
from Tutankhamuns tomb
So on balance then Id say that Mayas tomb was the implied model for the
discovery place of the Shining Trapezohedron. That the tomb had been lost
after 1843 may have made it seem especially alluring to Lovecraft. Lovecraft
also seems to very tangentially imply that, before it found its way to Mayas
tomb, the Shining Trapezohedron and thus the Haunter of the the Dark
monster had been at the centre of the famous Cretan Labyrinth.
11
12 My guess is that the name Nephren-Ka was derived from the gemstone jade, scientific
named Lapis Nephriticus. Nephren then being Lovecrafts simple Egyptian version of the latin
Nephriticus. Lovecraft was interested in minerals, owned a quarry, and his friend Morton was an
expert mineralogist. He owned several books on mineralogy, found in his library at his death.
Some summaries of the history of jade draw attention to Plinys famous The Natural History, where
Pliny gives a list of famous gemstones including the Adadu-nephros. This stone was one of
three sacred gemstones used to worship the Syrian god Adad the Syrians ubiquitous storm
god. In the famous primal Gilgamesh Epic (initial reception 18841935), Adad thunders inside a
black cloud turning to blackness all that is light (line trans. Speiser, in the book Ancient Near
Eastern Texts, 1950). There seems a close correspondence here with key elements of The
Haunter of the Dark. Yet the name Nephren-Ka was coined by Lovecraft years before, in 1921.
How to explain this? One possibility is this: having invented Nephren-Ka for The Outsider
simply as casual derivative of the scientific name for jade, in 1927 the more mature Lovecraft
investigated how the story of Nephren-Ka might be deepened by linking it with real myth. He
read up on the history of jade, and he was pleased to discover or be reminded of a link with a
sacred gem used to worship an ancient storm god of absolute blackness. At that time there were
several books that could inform an interested layman on the history and myths associated with
jade, such as: Charles William King, The natural history of gems or decorative stones, 1867; Edwin
William Streeter, Precious stones and gems: their history, sources and characteristics, 1898; and Charles
William King, Antique gems: their origin, uses, and value as interpreters of ancient history, 1866; alongside
the more obvious encyclopedia entries and suchlike.
13 Nephreu-Ka is a textual error in some versions of Dexter Ward. Thanks to Martin A.
for pointing this out to me.
131
Hebrew scholars may correct me on this, but I suspect that Hadoth was a
19th century Masonic confabulation. Since my online searches suggest that
Lovecraft could only really have had Hadoth with this meaning from
knowing the wording of the rites of certain Masonic orders on the East
Coast of America in the late 19th century.15 The visual quote above is from
the book of Masonic ritual Ecce Orienti! An Epitome of the History of the
Ancient Essenes (1870).16 This book went through several editions, because of
14 One of the three main Jewish sects active at the time of Jesus. See the 1906 Jewish
Encyclopedia for a clear account, including the accusations that they were semi-pagan. The
scholarship on them was later greatly expanded following the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
15 Unless he knew the Magyar language, from when it presumably gave the surname of the
obscure 16th century salt merchant Stephan Hadoth and the Eastern European rabbi Machzikei
Hadoth of Lemberg. It seems far more likely he had come across its use among U.S. Masons.
16 Wolcott Reddin, Ecce Orienti! An Epitome of the History of the Ancient Essenes, (third ed., 1870),
New York.
132
a modern Masonic order on the East Coast of the USA which modeled
themselves on the ancient Essenes and their rituals. The book is largely
cloaked in a basic abbreviation code, but the code was easily cracked and a
plain English version was also published.17 Possibly this esoteric Masonic
order, one seeking to resurrect a long-dead cult, also served as a rough
template for Lovecrafts Starry Wisdom sect?18 There are certainly obvious
parallels with the coded Masonic text and the coded nature of the cults book
found by Blake in The Haunter of the Dark
a crumbling volume of wholly unidentifiable characters yet with
certain symbols and diagrams shuddering recognizable to the occult
student. []The manuscript writing consisted of the common
traditional symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in
alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts the devices of the sun,
moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs here massed in solid
pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each
symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.
So Hadoth is obviously a dead end, in terms of suggesting or confirming an
actual geographic location. Lovecrafts vague by the Nile is as close as we
get. But chasing Hadoth has inadvertently led me to a possible inspiration
for the Starry Wisdom sect.
17 Anon., The Ritual of Pennsylvania: Ancient York Masonry. Possibly this was after Lovecrafts
time. I can find no date for it.
18 I am certainly no expert of Masonic lore and history, and have no wish to delve into the vast
nest of misinformation and invention woven around the Masons.
133
stories The Cairn on the Headland and The Thing on the Roof, and the
tangentially Lovecraftian but classic Bran Mak Morn story Worms of the
Earth.
I found that all six to be available in the audio book form in the collection
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, read by veteran audio-book reader
Robertson Dean. That was how I read the stories, so I was forced by the
nature of the medium to consider each word and I didnt skip or skim.
It had been rather a long time since I read and enjoyed Howards Conan
and other books. I encountered R.E. Howard as a boy, shortly after I first
read Lovecraft, via the UK Panther paperback story collections: Skull-face;
The Valley of the Worm; and The Shadow Kingdom. From there I went to the
UK Sphere King Kull collection, then dug through the numerous UK Sphere
Conan paperbacks (one or two of which were quite rare at that time, and I
remember it was difficult to gather a full set). Then the excellent Solomon
Kane stories, possibly via a tatty used import copy of the U.S. Centaur Books
paperback.
The Black Stone (1931) I found to be somewhat predictable, and it felt
rather clichd. But the writing style was vivid, brisk, and overall the story was
quite fun. I felt the best parts of the story to be: the bibliophiliac preamble;
the beautifully described and hair-raising walk through the night woods; the
very deft storytelling stagecraft used to present a number of minor and off134
stage characters; and the neat linkage with supposed historical facts toward
the end.
The Children of the Night (1931) has another deliciously bibliophilic
opening. Howard appears to have used the story to split Lovecrafts
personality between John Conrad the occult book collector/savant, and
Ketrick. Like Lovecraft, Ketrick is described as having a facial birth defect
along with
a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual
and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather
callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive
nature.
Some learned discussion between the characters brings up a mention of
Franz Boazs skull plasticity surveys. Howard has a character state
Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of
immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one
generation
which suggests that Lovecraft would by reading The Children of the
Night have been at least nominally made aware of this aspect of Boass
work, even if he didnt also hear of it in detail during the first year of the
Howard-Lovecraft correspondence. For more on this real historical topic,
see my lengthy essay on Boaz in my earlier book Walking with Cthulhu.
The atmosphere of the gentlemanly study in The Children of the Night
evaporates immediately on the story entering a Conan-like flashback episode.
The vigorous swordplay that follows is quite gripping, but the adversaries fail
to convince. For that reason they also failed to evoke any real frisson of
horror. A section shortly before the end of the story becomes rather
convoluted, since Howard uses it to expound a hazy race migration theory.
Yet Howard has left himself only one narrator for this speech, and has long
since thrown overboard the learned study setting which might have made it
more palatable to the reader. Overall, this was enjoyable but not memorable
135
story but I wished that the deliciously Lovecraftian opening had been far
more fully sustained.
The Cairn on the Headland (1933) I found to be rather poor. Set in
Ireland, the opening throws the reader straight into another tedious rant on
Howards racialist theories. Howard does manage to eventually set the scene,
but he does so in a manner which telegraphs a hint of the ending. I found
the story to be Lovecraftian only in the sense that it borrows an idea or two
from The Hound, and that the ending might be said to vaguely resemble
The Call of Cthulhu. I imagine Lovecraft would have handled and
structured such a tale very differently. It seems hard to believe that this story
was written a year after the classic Worms of the Earth. One suspects that,
on this story at least, Howard must have just been gunning the typewriter for
the money.
The Thing on the Roof (1932) I found quite Lovecraftian, and one
could almost imagine that this brisk and short work to be a lesser Lovecraft
story. I again enjoyed another bibliophiliac opening which, in contrast to
The Children of the Night, is then eased naturally into the body of the
story. There are several enjoyable little links made to Howards earlier story
The Black Stone. But as with Children of the Night, the unconvincing
nature of the central creature disappoints, and so fails to horrify. I also
cringed at large chunks of the surprisingly creaky dialogue, something which
reduced my enjoyment of the first half of the story.
Worms of the Earth (1932) is the last and the best Bran Mak Morn
story. It is very finely written, and beautifully constructed. Although it is
linked tangentially to both The Black Stone and The Children of the
Night, and the creatures of the latter story make a far more convincing
appearance here. The Lovecraftian elements are incredibly slight: a curse
that refers to Black gods of Rlyeh; the name Dagons Mere [a lake]; and
the name Dagons Barrow [a mound, covered with fungoid grass]. Despite
these slim pickings, this is a story well worth hearing.
136
S.T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary, Liverpool University Press , 2001, p.317.
One then wonders if the cinema job of a few weeks in the early spring of
1930 would have given him the funds, toward the end of the month, to pay
for his ticket on the long Charleston trip?
Thereafter he was writing the revision collaboration The Medusas Coil,
among other activities.
But which cinema was it? We shall probably never know, although the
subject of theatrical and cinema history in Providence is surprisingly well
documented,5 and is being actively researched and discussed online at 2013 in
quite some depth. I am indebted to those who have freely shared their
knowledge online. There are a goodly number of possible candidate theaters,
because
In this era [1900-1929] Providence was a great show town, and
vaudeville, burlesque, summer stock [theater], and movies rivaled
sports for the attention of the populace. [] In addition to [the
major entertainment houses], there were a half-dozen smaller, less
glamorous entertainment houses in the central city.6
I examined two modern and substantial online directories of the historical
theaters of Providence, compiled with some care by stage and cinema history
enthusiasts. I discounted theatres that were not operating 1929/30, or which
were in immigrant areas such as Federal Hill not likely to have appealed to
Lovecraft. The names, details and addresses of the theatres I considered are
available online at my blog. I also here note that the upmarket Albee cinema
was attended frequently by one of Lovecrafts aunts in the early/mid 1920s.
The BIJOU theater (EMPIRE7 cinema from March 1930) on 368
Westminster Street was my final hunch for the cinema that Lovecraft
5 The key foundational work is by Roger Brett, Temples of Illusion: The Golden Age of Theaters in an
American City, Brett Theatrical, 1976. This is a detailed history of all the old downtown area
theatres of Providence from 1871 to 1950 in 309 pages. There is also the pamphlet by Carmen
Maiocco, Downcity: Downtown Providence in the 1950s, Rhode Island Historical Society, 1997.
6
The Age of Optimism: 1900-1929, article on the Providence City Archives website.
Not to be confused with the VICTORY aka Keiths / Empire movie theater, then nearby at
260 Westminster Street.
7
138
worked at, although there were another eight perfectly possible candidates.
The BIJOU, until early 1930, might not initially seem a promising candidate.
It seems to have been a seedy dive of dubious morals
In a 1996 Providence Journal article on old Providence theatres,
writer Michael Janusonis wrote that the hoity toities referred to it
as the sinkhole of depravity or just The Sink.
It appears to have staged scantily-clad and risqu musical revues in the
1920s, and one assumes that the girls also had other lines of business after
the shows. 8 An unlikely home for Lovecraft. But sometime in Spring 1930
it ceased offering the girls and instead became
a second-run [movie] house and changed the name to the
EMPIRE. (my thanks to Gerald A. DeLuca for this lead).
This is confirmed by Boxoffice magazine
Cheri was one of the last musical revues to play the BIJOU. That
was in March 1930. Shortly after that Spitz [the owner] converted it
into a second-run [movie] house and changed the name to the
EMPIRE. It was under this title that the theatre operated until
about six months ago [1949] when it was shuttered for good.9
So the EMPIRE would have been likely hiring staff at the right time for
Lovecraft to take a job there, around March/April 1930, after its rename and
makeover. There are a number of reasons, beyond the date, that this might
have been the cinema Lovecraft worked it:
8 The original name was apparently The Sink, according to the contemporary Melvin Ballou
Gilbert, in The Director, Volume 1, p.69. He recounts the genesis of the theatre as a private venue
set up by a group of men as a midnight smoker, in which the prettiest of the chorus and ballet
girls were brought over in cabs after the shows without changing out of their scanty costumes...
Boxoffice magazine, 7th January 1950, via Providence early cinema expert Gerald A. DeLuca.
139
i.
ii. The timing of the job vacancies meant that Lovecraft would have
been tempted, due to the spring weather, to venture forth on a
regular basis after his usual winter hermitage. He does not seem
to have liked walking in cold weather, so is unlikely to have
committed himself to a Winter 1929/30 job.
iii. On a map the EMPIRE looks like it was a fairly short walk from his
home, a walk of perhaps a mile and half.
This is all a bit tenous, of course, but at this stage of the Lovecraftian
excavation project scholars are going to have to start developing grounded
hypotheses about Lovecraftian lacunae as well as doing core scholarship, if
we are to eventually find overlaps between such hypotheses that can perhaps
fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of Lovecraft.
140
by the three proto-pulp Munsey magazines Argosy, The All-Story, and The
Cavalier. Will Murray states of Lovecraft that He appears to have read
them [the Munsey magazines] from cover to cover.3 Lovecraft seems to
have stopped reading All-Story Cavalier only in late 1914,4 presumably as he
improved his literary tastes. Certainly he was reading All-Story in the first
half of the 1910s, since he had a letter published in the 8th February 1913
issue. This letter praised Irvin S. Cobbs story Fishhead5 which he had read
in 1913.6 He had another letter published there in March 1914 and in the
14th August 1914 edition, the latter praising George Allen England who
1 Annotation by S.T. Joshi, in H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories,
Penguin Classics, 2001, p.373. This was just three years before the writing of Dagon (1917),
which began the Lovecraft Mythos.
2
Will Murray, Lovecraft and the Pulp Magazine Tradition, IN: An Epicure in the terrible: a
centennial anthology of essays in honor of H.P. Lovecraft, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991,
p.104.
3
4 By May 1914 it was the combined All-Story Cavalier Weekly, and it may have lost some of its
previous character by the end of 1914. See: S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, Hippocampus Press,
2010, p.140.
5
6 Cobbs Fishhead seems relevant as a source for The Shadow over Innsmouth, and is an
interesting indication of the way Lovecraft could reach back to his Munsey magazine reading as
inspiration.
141
wrote the post-apocalyptic The Vacant World novel.7 But his favorite author
was Garrett P. Serviss (1851-1929).8 Lovecrafts library contained three of
Servisss non-fiction works9, and Lovecraft used a section from one of them
verbatim in his Beyond The Wall of Sleep (1919).10
S.T. Joshi, Lovecrafts Library: A Catalogue (2nd revised edition), Hippocampus Press, 2002.
10
Among there are Pleasures of the Telescope (1901); Other Worlds: Their Nature, Possibilities and
Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries (1901); The Moon (1907); Astronomy With The Naked Eye
(1908); Curiosities of the Sky (1909); Round the Year with the Stars (1910); and Astronomy in a Nutshell
(1912). These and others are freely available in digital facsimile at Archive.org
11
12 For more on Servisss astronomy activities, see the front-page obituary One Who Loved the
Stars in Popular Astronomy, Aug-Sept 1929. This is freely available online.
142
married13 circa the late 1870s, and his son Garrett Serviss (18811907)
became the Silver Medalist high jumper at the 1904 Olympic Games.
Garrett P. Serviss.
13
stage. Some of the bulbs are red, some blue, and some white, and all are
controlled by a single instrument in such a manner that a lunar or other
landscape can be illuminated by ever so many changing hues. The sun is an
arc light of 18,000 candle-power, enclosed in an iron box and projected
through lenses upon the back drop from behind the latter. An eclipse is
made by passing an opaque disc across the lens. For the moon an arc light
of only 2,000 candlepower is employed. Many other phenomena are
illustrated by various devices. Volcanoes seem to throw up streams of lava,
while steam ascends in clouds from a perforated pipe running across the
front of the stage; lightning lag flashes vividly, and the scene is rendered
more realistically appalling by peals and crashes of thunder, which a small
boy creates by banging a sheepskin stretched on a wooden frame with balls
of wood hanging against it causing it to vibrate with awesome noise.14
The Evening Post of 14th April 1892 claimed that the show exceeded in
effects even that of the famous Wagner operas at Bayreuth, now a touchstone
of research into early multimedia performance
No operatic performances in America or Europe not even at
Bayreuth, have ever had the benefit of such brilliant and thoroughly
artistic scenic effects as these.
Advert for the Carnegie Music Hall show, Science, 25th March 1892.
14 Rene Bache, Pittsburg Dispatch, 20th November 1892. There may also be an extant Scientific
American report with illustrations although I cannot trace the article
His electrical designer for the projectors and other lighting was the Electrical
Stage Lighting Co. of J. C. Mayrhofer...
Most of the wonderful effects of light and color in Professor
Garrett Serviss clever lecture on Urania, were designed by Mr. J. C.
Mayrhofer, who has since then made remarkable strides in the new
art in which he has done such excellent pioneer service.15
The Urania Lectures show is known to have visited the Tremont Theatre in
Boston in 1892, and Lovecrafts family may have seen it there. One wonders
if they even took the two year old Lovecraft, or if the show later came to
Providence in 1893 or 1894? Could a very early childhood memory of this
special cosmic show be the genesis of Lovecrafts Nyarlathotep, or even
have sparked his infant feeling of cosmicism before his involvement in
astronomy?16 Or might he have been able to see a printed illustrated
programme of the show,17 and been told memories of the show by his
relatives, while growing up?
One also wonders if the Urania show was revived in 1905-7? There is a
mention of Garrett P. Serviss integrating slides and other aids in his lectures
in the 1906-7 season18 and an ad for his lectures appeared in the Yearbook
and Official Roster of the YMCA (1905). But these lectures were perhaps part
of his general lecturing activities, undertaken without the support of a full
theatre staff and lighting engineers that he had had for Urania.
In the 1920s Serviss worked in cinema production, on the 4-reel animated
explanatory film The Einstein Theory of Relativity (Red Seal, 1923)...
15
16 For more on this method of lecture presentation see: Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: performing
science, magic, and religion In America, Rutgers University Press, 2005.
17 It appears a pamphlet, programme or article of 10 pages has survived: Urania: Introduced in
America and Conducted by the Music Hall Company of New York, Morris Reno, President : Comprising the
Wonderful Stage Spectacles A Trip to the Moon, and The Seven Ages of Our World (from Chaos to Man)
... Explanatory Discourse by Garrett P. Serviss. I have been unable to see this, but it is listed as from
the Tremont Theatre, Boston, Mass., dated 1892.
18
One imagines that Lovecraft might have seen this film when it was released.
Although S.T. Joshi has shown that Lovecraft does not appear to have
properly grasped Einstein until 1929, until which time he drew...
wild conclusions from Einstein, both metaphysical and ethical,
[that] are entirely unfounded19
Thus Serviss could almost have been describing Lovecraft when he wrote of
the nature of the public misunderstandings generated around Einsteins
ideas
As concerns the intellect of the average person, he is responsible
for having let loose from their caves a bevy of blind bats whose wild
19 S.T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his time, Liverpool University Press,
2001, p.183.
147
Life on Mars?
Serviss supported Percival Lowells famously wrong claims of life on Mars...
Percival Lowell from Flagstaff, Ariz., stating that a large
projection of Mars has been discovered, leads Prof. Garrett P. Serviss
to declare that the planet is undoubtedly inhabited.
Serviss also addressed this topic in popular fiction. His early SF Edisonade
Edisons Conquest of Mars (1898) anticipated Edgar Rice Burroughss John
20
Carter of Mars (Carter first appearing Under the Moons of Mars in The
All-Story Magazine in 1912). Edisons Conquest of Mars has been noted and
discussed by literary historians because of its pivotal place in the science
fiction of Mars between Wells and Burroughs, and a few political literary
academics have also scored a few easy points by scorning the works strongly
pro- Anglo-Saxon and pro- Imperial attitudes.
23
David Haden, Walking with Cthulhu: H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26
24
The Moon Metal was also published in 1900, as a now-lost newspaper syndication.
25
150
Are there other works by Serviss which might have appealed to Lovecraft?
Serviss was a mountain climber even into his 40s and he had published
articles such as Climbing Mont Blanc in a Blizzard (1896). Around 19051908 Serviss also researched and wrote on the work of the plant hybridizer
Luther Burbank (1849-1926),26 which resulted in two important
Cosmopolitan Magazine articles, the first being Transforming the world of
plants; the wonder-work of Luther Burbank which shows how man can
govern evolution (1905). Perhaps there were reprinted in the popular
science magazines of the 1920s, where Lovecraft might have read them?27
Lovecraft was notable in his use of plant-animal hybrids in his fiction.
Serviss appears to have been a devotee of the Swedish philosopher and
scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Further research on this facet
of Serviss might trace elements of Swedenborgian belief being expressed in
his works, and then perhaps detect consequent influences on Lovecraft. In
this respect is it perhaps interesting to note that Servisss non-fiction Other
Worlds: Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest
Discoveries (1901), although a conventionally brisk and vivid survey of the
Solar System, opens with the follow remarkable quotation. The sentiment of
the lines seem almost a precursor or Lovecrafts cosmic indifferentism
Shall we measure the councils of heaven by the narrow impotence
of human faculties, or conceive that silence and solitude reign
throughout the mighty empire of nature? Dr. Thomas Chalmers
(1780-1847).28
26 Expert practical plant hybridizer, who gave the world over 800 strains and varieties of useful
plants. See: William Harwood, New Creations in Plant Life: An Authoritative Account of the Life and
Work of Luther Burbank, Macmillan, 1907.
27 I know of no comprehensive Serviss bibliography covering his entire output of fiction and
non-fiction. He would seem to be an interesting candidate for a PhD thesis, if anyone cares to
write it.
28 The leading Scottish intellectual of his time, then world famous, but now almost totally
forgotten.
151
153
Despite the apparent indirection of his voice via the beard, his former student
Faunce remembered at Brown in 1922 Appletons clarity of diction
No student ever had to ask him to put a question a second time.
No listener ever questioned as to what he meant. He speaks as he
stands upright, downright and forthright. (Encyclopedia
Brunoniana)
154
Here are the remarkable engravings from Appletons slightly earlier and first
work in his series, the Beginners Hand-book of Chemistry. Its fascinating to
imagine that these could have almost formed a rough template for Lovecrafts
later works of fiction
155
156
Nyarlathotep:
157
158
The dreamlands:
Cool Air:
159
Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient,
or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand
years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the
red Arcturus Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919).
I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel
empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in 5,000 A.D The
Shadow Out of Time (1934-35).
It appears this name originates in Tibetan, not Chinese. In Tibetan it has a
more congruent meaning than Chinese, being commonly appended to words
to imply possessing1
Thus its finds its way into the formal names of the earliest Tibetan Buddhist
kings (King Srong-tsan, founder of the capital at Lhasa, etc). It takes this
meaning from ancient tsan deities of pre-Buddhist Tibet. Ethnographer
Karma Ura tells more of the archaic thinking behind this kingly
appellation2
1
Karma Ura, Deities, archers, and planners in the era of decentralisation, 2010.
160
Human relations with the spirits, especially the lha or tsan, are
cited as instances of inducing superior clan lineages. Reinvigoration
of the human genetic pool, it is said, took place when a tsan begot a
child
Ura also vividly tells more about the ways one variety of these tsan spirits
were focused as genius loci for human uses
cliffs associated with brag tsan deities also harbour old fungi and
lichens. The citadels of deities, in the form of sacred groves, often
perform the function of a wind blockade, standing as protective
gateways to inhabited valleys.3
These are the beliefs and practices of the ancient Bon-pas, the aboriginal
pre-Buddhist inhabitants of the Tibet region, now almost eradicated by
Buddhism. Bon practice an animistic and devil-dancing or Shamanist
religion4 The first [historical] stage of Bon shamans was known as the
black sect.5
These Bon animists lead, through the online resources, to details of the
historic use of tsan as a prefix name in Tibet, as it is used by Lovecraft. In
this prefix form it refers directly to one of the Tsan: group of mountain
deities6 and as such can also prefix the everyday names of various rivers and
mountains. The historical ethnography book Bon in the Himalaya gives more
details
Tsan: These deities are present in rocks, gorges, trees and all
mountains. They are in armour and on horseback. Their bodies are
painted red.7
3
Karma Ura, Deities, archers, and planners in the era of decentralisation, Karma Ura, 2004.
See the chapter Pre-Lamist Tibet in Tibetan Buddhism: with Its Mystic Cults, Symbolism and
Mythology, 1895 (reprinted 1934). Available free online in digital facsimile.
4
5 Christina Pratt, An Encyclopedia of Shamanism, Volume 1, Rosen, 2007, p.65. Although it strikes
me that this name may arise from anti-Bon Buddhist propaganda.
6
Hugo E. Kreijger, Tibetan Painting: The Jucker Collection, Serindia Publications, 2001, p.189.
In more modern times of Buddhist hegemony, the tsan sacred grove had by
then shrunk into the diminutive form8 of a small horned model-house made
of wood. This was called a tsan-kang, and was placed on a roof of a dwelling
house
[a priest]performs a purificatory fumigation of the entire
household, from the stables to the altar-room and finally to the roof,
by carrying around a large pan with coals and juniper branches. He
finally leaves the pan on the roof, next to the tsan-kang (btsan khang,
house of the tsn deity), which is the support or dwelling-place of
the domestic deity, the po-lha. The tsan-kang and the pair of horns
that often surmounts it are given a fresh coat of paint (they are
generally red or white, sometimes both), and the juniper branches,
small prayer-flags [] that crown the tsan-kang are renewed.
The tsan-kang is presumably horned because imagined by the Bon as angry
and red-faced. Red-faced representations of the tsan are also made, and kept
in secret inner shrines open only to adepts. One modern ethnographer
talked of seeing, in a replica of an authentic inner shine, representations of
wrathful protector deities [and recognising] one a zhidak or
mountain deity, the other a red-faced tsan depicted with ferocious
faces, popping eyes, and bared white fangs.9
Thus a tsan is effectively the equivalent of a western devil, at least in terms
of the angry visage, horns, and the red face/body, although they appear to
protect places rather than entice people to wickedness. I can find no
reference to any particular Tsan-chan type of tsan deity.
Given all this, one thus wonders if Lovecraft had the name Tsan-Chan
from reading or hearing a public talk from the Theosophist Nicholas
8 For more on the domestication of mountain deities see: Kleeman, Terry, F., Mountain
Deities in China: the domestication of the Mountain God and the subjugation of the margins,
Journal of the American Oriental Society, 111, 2 (1994), pp.226-238.
9 Charlene Makley, in Tim Oakes (Ed.), Faiths on Display: Religion, Tourism, and the Chinese State,
Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, p.138.
162
Nicholas Roerich, Heart of Asia: Memoirs from the Himalayas, Inner Traditions, 1990.
I have as yet been unable to pinpoint the date of Lovecrafts first serious readings in
Theosophy.
11
163
Tsan to indicate a Tibetan King (and thus to very obliquely hint at the
Plateau of Leng).
But if he did know of the Tibetan devil-like tsan deities then perhaps
Lovecraft impishly strengthened the tsans similarity with the western Devil
by making up a Tsan-Chan name that was just a little more similar to
Sa-tan.
164
have not been able to determine exactly which apartment was hers.1 We do
know that it was a comfortable but not a huge size, and possibly expensive,
since Sonia was then earning a huge annual salary in the New York millinery
trade. Below are 2013 rental agent pictures of #2C in the block, which are
indicative of the likely interior modeling and staircase layout of her
apartment. There was probably a small chandelier where that ugly bare
fluorescent light is now
1 Looking at a view of the frontage, it appears there were either six or eight in the block. But
judging by the number of letterboxes seen above, there could be sixteen apartments.
165
166
2 The address for this first shop is evidenced by an embroidered hat label with her shops name
and address on it, found inside her 1932 passport, as listed in the lwcurrey.com sale page for the
passport in 2013.
3
hat shop at the same address would also collapse. Also within months of
opening, it seems. One wonders why she was so foolish to invest her savings
in such a risky venture.
I have been unable to find any details of the stores use from 1919 to the
time Sonia had it, or any photograph or drawing of it. It seems surprising
that Sonias first hat store has left no trace in the online record. Perhaps
something of that size and location was thought not to need press
advertising, or the relevant directories and trade publications have not yet
been scanned and placed online? Perhaps the sheer speed of the collapse (a
few months, it seems) meant that Sonia had no chance to build up a wad of
profits that could be spent on advertising?
The details of the visit are in S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, page 707 onwards.
168
From the Shopping With Susan column, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York,
Sunday 27th May 1928, page 6A.
This item might suggest that the shops launch was not a success in terms of
selling full-price hats, but then again it may just be clever marketing to entice
the new summer hat buyers of late May. Perhaps both at the same time.
The shop was still trading in September
From the Shopping With Susan column, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York,
Sunday 16th September 1928, page 9A
From the Shopping With Susan column, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York,
Sunday 23rd September 1928, page ?A
169
Google StreetView also shows similar period shops on the opposite side of
Cortelyou Road, although without such a wide pavement. You can just
170
about see Sonias apartment building at the back of this picture, on the
extreme left of this picture.
Whether the hat shop was to be seen in this picture, or was opposite on the
other side of the street, may be debatable until new evidence arises. But
either way it obviously still exists and is in retail use. Yet S.T. Joshi states in
I Am Providence (p.707) that 368 E. 17th St. no longer exists, and that
there is no longer any address with this number. This is clearly not the
case, once we are able to follow up the additional on Cortelyou Rd
information. Judging by Joshis comment about the shop now being replaced
by a small garage (which is clearly and obviously visible on Google Street
View, at the apartment location of 370 East 17th St.), it seems clear to me
that S.T. Joshi has inadvertently confused the vanished apartment location
with the still-existing shop location.
171
173
174
Blackstone Park ran on north into the extensive wooded and partly
landscaped grounds of Butler Hospital, and then beyond these grounds was
the Swan Point Cemetery (laid out in 1875).
west bank of the Seekonk River, clearly showing the sequence of progression
along the shoreline from Blackstone Butler to Swan Point
As judged by the detailed description of the grounds and the Grotto in the National Register
of Historic Places Nomination Form for Butler Hospital, 30th April 1986. Available online.
There was a small wooded and ferny stream valley in the hospital grounds, the upper part of the
stream leading through the grounds to the Seekonk, but it would have been i) inaccessible to
bands of small boys in Lovecrafts time, and ii) still exists.
5
175
176
still I lit
Another lamp as starry Leo climbed
Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed
Three and the firelight faded, bit by bit.
Lovecraft was still visiting the bank of the Seekonk in 1930, as evidenced
by letters such as that addressed from Seekonk River bank August 19307,
and his comments in a later letter that he would often seek out the Seekonk
shore on summer days.
177
The stroll along the Seekonk would have had special meaning for
Lovecraft, had he known that Poe had walked the same walk.8 Poe wrote
that he and Sarah Helen Whitman walked to the wilderness from
Providence on a fateful walk, and Whitman later remembered and named the
exact setting in a poem that autumnal day when by the Seekonks lonely
wave we stood
Incidentally, it seems that one could reach the Seekonk River (after 1908)
through the one-mile tunnel that went under College Hill. As seen here in
this Library of Congress picture, titled East Side Railroad Tunnel, Benefit
Street to Seekonk River, Providence
8 Robert A. Geake, A History of the Providence River, The History Press, 2013, p.123. Possibly he
did not know if the Poe walk, as if he did then he probably would have mentioned it in his letters.
178
It was also used for ice skating parties around Lovecrafts time, enjoyed by
the pupils of the adjacent Moses Brown School There were skating
179
Above: Brown team who cleared the northerly part of Cat Swamp in the mid 1920s.
181
182
So all this puts Cat Swamp starting about a third of a mile north of Angell
Street, and ending about a mile north of Angell Street in the form of the
Great Swamp.
But does Lovecraft ever talk of it? Lovecraft doesnt mention Cat Swamp
by name, at least in any source I can find. The filling in of the southern parts
for housing is very suggestive, but one suspects he would have used such an
evocative name in his letters when referring to the hollows and made some
passing jollity about the place name and kitty cats. But he did not. He did
write more generally, of the open area just to the north and east of his home
(see the quote given on the first page in this essay) but without naming Cat
Swamp. All this is very suggestive that his hollows were not in the swamp
area.9
So, having examined all the known facts on Cat Swamp, it does not appear
likely to have had any remarkable wooden hollows in it, especially since the
nature of swamp land and its drainage would have meant that such hollows
would have quickly become leveled-out swamp sumps.
183
1985 aerial photograph (north, looking south) showing the two stream coves along
the Seekonk river.
The site on the right is the river outlet for the stream that drains the
northern part of what was north Cat Swamp, and the one on the left (with
10
the pond) drains what used to be south Cat Swamp.11 The U.S. Geological
Survey 1891 map clearly shows these two tributary ravines, one at the south
tip of the Butler Hospital grounds and the other at what is now York Pond.
The remark that the childhood tributary ravine had been wholly filled and
obliterated is curious. One does not fill in a tributary ravine in a major city,
as they all serve key drainage purposes within any riverside terrain. One
would have to pipe the stream through the ravine, and bury the pipe, or else
wholly divert the stream. One wonders if Lovecraft actually meant the eerie
ravine that formed one of his first childhood memories, formed in 1892
while either on holiday or at the Guiney house? If so, then we may be being
misled, if we go looking for a filled and obliterated tributary ravine on the
Seekonk.
11 Originally called Baileys Upper Cove (north) and Baileys Lower Cove (south). The lower
cove being beds of reed for thatching houses in the 1700s, now York Pond.
185
Here is a picture of the York Pond tributary ravine seen from above by
satellite photography. One can see a faint spread of sediment into the river,
from the channel that still takes the stream along the south edge of the pond
and into the Seekonk.
Above: York Pond in Blackstone Park, River Rd. curving around it into Irving
Avenue. Seekonk River on the right. Presumably this is the 5 acre wooded
ravine given to city for a park in 1866, 12 the ravine leading to what was formerly
Baileys Lower Cove. The stream unnamed, but draining from Cat Swamp.
The following map, for a proposed but never-built turn of the century
scheme on the site, shows how house plots were once mapped and ravine
walks planned for the cove/corner in question.
12 Nina Ridhibhinyo, Land-Use History & Forest Dynamics in an Urban Natural Area:
Blackstone Park, Providence, R.I., 6th December 2007. This was the Parks first plot.
186
The shorefront road now runs as a barrier between the pond and the river,
to join up the River Rd with Irving Avenue.13 14 Above is an undated
postcard of this corner, looking south-east, after the grading of the Irving
Avenue extension and the connection of the two roads (possibly circa 1900).
One can still see road surveying stakes in the foreground. My feeling is that
the height of the bluffs on the north side of York Pond were lowered by
earth-moving at this time.
The grand housing scheme here never happened, but it seems to have been
an excuse for the City to totally cease park maintenance spending until 1908.
I have found one item suggesting that the Park was in almost complete
disuse, as if the City was deliberately avoiding spending money on it ahead of
a possible home building scheme
By 1908, Blackstone Park had fallen into almost complete disuse;
in fact, according to a Providence Journal article published in 1912,
13 The connection appears to have been left unconnected, at least in 1896... BLACKSTONE
PARK: The River Road (so called) at this park has been practically completed from Hamilton
Avenue to Irving Avenue, a distance of 3,000 feet. (Report of the Park Commissioners, 1896). I have
been unable to pin a precise date on the final link-up of the River Road with Irving Avenue.
Presumably that would also be the date at which the cove was flooded back into its ravine and
formed the freshwater York Pond.
14 We do know that there was also a new path in around York Pond, accompanying the new
steps, since in 1911 Brown University students included a circuit of the pond in a cross-country
run route.
187
the only benefit the park provided residents of the area during the
first decade of the twentieth century was to provide illegally obtained
natural resources such as lumber, shrubs, and sand. In the early
spring of 1908, over 50 residents of the Blackstone Park Plat whose
property abutted the park submitted a petition to the Board of Park
Commissioners asking for a number of improvements to be made to
the park, including a general clean-up of the park15
Presumably the aim of the City was the run down the park so much that
houses could be built on its entirety. Indeed, the City Report noted in 1901
that... Contour lines at intervals of two feet have been run over the whole
park and the field notes are ready for platting i.e. for the laying out of future
home plots. The official neglect of the park from c.1896-1908 and resulting
wildness would certainly have attracted adventurous young boys from the
neighborhood.
We may only learn the truth of the site when we can know the exact
topographic contours around York Pond between 1896 (the date when we
know the River Rd construction was nearing this spot) and 1906-8 (when we
know stone extraction and the grading of the Irving Avenue bluffs took
place). Was there a small rocky spur ravine here, quarried out and then filled
in? Perhaps just to the north of Irving Avenue? That we may never know.
But perhaps new old maps may come to light.
After the public uproar over the parks neglect in 1908, the housing scheme
seems to have been put aside for good. Perhaps importantly, major grading
works were undertaken on the steep rock bluffs on the York Pond cove in
1908
[after the period of neglect] In 1908 the city improved the park
under the stewardship of Parks Superintendent Greene.
Improvements included the creation of a bridle path for horseback
15 From the history in National Register of Historic Places: Blackstone Park Historic District, p.56.
Referencing Blackstone Park - An Unspoiled Beauty Spot, Providence Journal, August 4, 1912,
sec.5, p.3.
188
Steps to the pond down the northern bluff, steps made in 1908. Pillars and bottom
wall added 1930s by the WPA employment scheme. Photo: Dan Mahr.
There had been gravel and stone extraction from the bluffs before the 1908
works
[the City is taking] cross sections of north slope of Irving Avenue
at Blackstone Grades for [use as] granolithic pavement [i.e.: the best
quality of paving stones] (Annual Report of the City Engineer,
1906)
I can find no more about Blackstone Grades. Serious stone extraction from
the bluffs around York Pond and the end of Irving Avenue would certainly
be the sort of City venture which could have obliterated one of Lovecrafts
childhood haunts, perhaps sited just north of York Pond.
But the case for this location is still not certain, other than to simply say
there is and never was any other likely ravine outlet to the Seekonk on the
16
East Side. Perhaps the site was inland? But I have already looked in detail at
Cat Swamp, and the location sought is clearly dark wooded hollows near the
Seekonk River in a ravine. The topographical maps of the 1890s show no
other possible ravine inland, with or without a pond or a steam.
York Pond and road seen today in winter, from the south side. Photo: Dan Mahr
Looking down on the road from the south bluff, pond in the left corner. Indicating
likely original height of the northern bluff before road grading. Photo: Dan Mahr.
190
One might suspect there was a pond at the site because of Lovecrafts long
semi-autobiographical poem The Poe-ets Nightmare (1916). In the poem
he draws strongly on his memories of the dark wooded hollows in the
ravine, then some sixteen years before. The poem, albeit giving the site a
more poetiky supernatural setting of a moor, depicts an...
[...] insomnious grove
Whose black recesses never saw the sun.
Within that grove a hideous hollow lies,
Half bare of trees; a pool in centre lurks
That none dares sound; a tarn of murky face
(Tho naught can prove its hue, since light of day,
Affrighted, shuns the forest-shadowd banks).
Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes,
From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air
That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees
Which stand about, clawing the spectral gloom
With evil boughs. To this accursed dell
Come woodland creatures, seldom to depart:
Once I beheld, upon a crumbling stone
Set altar-like before the cave, a thing
I saw not clearly, yet from glimpsing, fled.
The poems setting is clearly associated with Lovecrafts famous nightgaunts, when the narrator of the poem sleeps in the cave and experiences an
unbodied version of these gaunts...
Then flickerd low the light, and all dissolvd,
Leaving me floating in the hellish grasp
Of bodyd blackness, from whose beating wings
Came ghoulish blasts of charnel-scented mist.
Things vague, unseen, unfashiond, and unnamd
191
Note that I have already shown that Lovecraft linked the hollows and the
gaunts together in his childhood
[the] dark wooded hollows [] figured in my dreams
especially those nightmares containing the black, winged rubbery
entities which I called night-gaunts from Some Notes on a
Nonentity.17
The narrator of the poem then looks down on the phosphorescent effulgence
of the pond and its marshy rim...
Now glowd the ground, and tarn, and cave, and trees,
And moving forms, and things not spoken of,
With such a phosphorescence as men glimpse
In the putrescent thickets of the swamp
Where logs decaying lie, and rankness reigns.
Methought a fire-mist drapd with lucent fold
The well-rememberd features of the grove
Note here the phrase well-rememberd features of the grove. This indicates
to me that this is an autobiographical poem.18
The grove is described as situated in the dale which is a northern British
word for a valley, usually wide and with steep sides. In the spot described by
the poem the valley bottom is opened out to be large enough for a substantial
small pool in its centre, fringed with swampy thickets. This is congruent
with the valleys stream opening out to find a larger body of water, as at York
Pond rather than the natural shore cove of the other tributary ravine at
17
Also evidenced by an opening section that describes the little garden Lovecraft made in his
early teenage years, in an overgrown vacant lot next to his home.
18
192
the south tip of the Butler Hospital grounds. No island is mentioned.19 The
tall trees around the poems pond mean that direct sunlight rarely reaches the
waters surface due to the forest-shadowd banks of the valley. Very close by
the pond is a cliff cave in the rock, from the entrance of which one can look
directly down onto the ponds surface. There is also the poems hint of
downward to a sea, which very subtly and glancingly seems to incorporate
Lovecrafts memory of the Seekonk River.
Now, one has to be careful here. One clear and strong possibility is that in
this poem Lovecraft is doing what he often did in his later work: conflating
two real places together to create a powerful fictional setting. So I suspect he
may have been conflating the wholly filled and obliterated ravine(s?) of his
childhood, with the still existing York Pond. In the highly precise language
of a long poem, Lovecraft has obviously been able to supply us with a
memorable and precise topographic description of York Pond and its
surroundings. Perhaps there was once a boyhood cave scrabbled into the
bluffs overlooking York Pond, now obliterated by road grading or stone
quarrying. But this does not mean the poem is necessarily a description of
the original wholly filled and obliterated ravine, which (if it was not the
Guiney ravine, of age two) I suspect was actually a little north of York Pond.
Yet at least York Pond can now be clearly identified as the site of the early
weird poem The Poe-ets Nightmare (1916), in which Dagon (horrific
creature on an altar-like stone) and Rlyeh (water that none dares sound,
and from which the unspeakable arises) are rehearsed for the first time,
leading into a long exposition of cosmicism. It seems fitting that the ur-site
of Lovecrafts first successful evocation of landscape-fear and cosmicism
should now be like Rlyeh sunken under a depth of water.
19 We know that the central island at York Pond is a modern addition (or perhaps a product of
a building up an existing underwater mound) since a local man remembers that it was not there in
the 1950s. He also remembers York Pond was deeper in the 1950s. One wonders if, along
with the island, the pond was also made shallower. Or possibly it has just silted up over the
decades. It seems the latter is the case. A small restoration project was funded to dredge the
pond in the early 2000s, but failed for lack of planning. The pond has also seemed to get
smaller as invasive plants have grown in around the edges. Sarah Gleason interviewing,
Blackstone Park Then and Now, 8th December 2012, www.blackstoneparksconservancy.org
193
The Google StreetView, on River Rd., looking over the York Pond, indicating the
wooded ravine nature of the land from which the pond emerges.
A clearer pop-up picture of the York Pond in summer via Google Earth, again seen
from the River Rd. The current Irving Trail and Ravine Trail skirt the pond.
194
Map of parks and green spaces in Providence that Lovecraft could have known in his
boyhood. From Providence magazine vol.28, 1916. Map showing situation on City
ownership of parks in 1903. Omits unofficial spaces such as remains of Cat Swamp.
195
garden of The Paxton essentially ran into that of No.66 and that it was easy
to move between the two.
Above: detail from Plat Book of the City of Providence Rhode Island, 1918.
196
through two paired windows (one facing west and another south). So his
desk would have been looking at the back parts of the Alpha Delta Phi
(Brunonian chapter) fraternity house at Brown. This appears in the
Lovecraft story The Haunter of the Dark as
Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked
into Blakes study, noticed the blurred white face
Above: Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house. Lovecrafts last home out of sight, directly
behind the fraternity house in this view. In the left of his view from his two west
windows he would have seen the NE upper windows of the short wing at the back of
the fraternity house.
198
nsanity was one of the very real horrors of the early years of the
20th century. One of its many forms was a contagious
insanity-causing disease that was literally stalking through the
back lanes of New England. Just as with the disease syphilis,1 the fearsome
animal-borne disease of rabies caused insanity, via a mechanism known
medically as hydrophobia. The insanity-causing aspect of the disease might
make rabies of special interest to Lovecraftian researchers. Just how
prevalent was rabies? It was certainly a real fear by the middle of the 18th
century
By 1768 rabies had been distributed throughout New England.2
An epidemic of it appears to have hit Rhode Island in 1797, occurring in all
sorts of animals. It had alarmed the doctors enough for them to set up a
reporting system by 1849
the increase of rabies of late in New England renders it obligatory
on those physicians, who may meet with it, to give an account of
their cases as soon as convenient3
This did not prevent severe outbreaks in the 1890s
[the] hydrophobia scare prevails in Eastern Connecticut and
Western Rhode Island. ... this terror has been steadily augmented
since last Autumn by an extraordinary series of incidents... [the more
rural population] especially at night they dare not venture abroad lest
1 The fear of which might explain something of Lovecrafts lifelong aversion to sex, since it
had apparently caused both of his parents to die insane.
2
a mad dog, running at large and foaming at the mouth, may leap
upon them out of the darkness. ... [in one place] the whole village
armed itself with shotguns, stones, and staves, and hunted the
furious animal ... the mad dog scare continued [throughout the area
stated] in intermittent outbreaks all winter...4
On 13th Dec 1906, when Lovecraft would have been age 16, the Lewiston
Saturday Journal reported a continuation of an epidemic that had already
lasted months
Mad Dogs Running Amuk, New York Times, 28th June 1890.
So the boy Lovecraft was growing up at time when a fear of rabid dogs
must have been prevalent among children and youths. I wonder if this might
partly help explain Lovecrafts general dislike of dogs?
By the 1910s Rhode Island had rabies basically under control in terms of
deaths, although the disease may have been naturally quiescent since it moves
through times of peaks and troughs. Rhode Island only had four human
deaths from rabies between 1911 and 1917, one in Providence in 1913.6 It
dipped in the deadly Influenza epidemic year
During the year 1918 rabies has been far less common among
animals than in the past few years7
And yet the fear caused by rabies would not only be in the probability of a
raving death, but rather in the uncertainty invoked in a victim after any dog
bite. It would have caused intense anxiousness on encountering any aroused
dog, not least because it was then known by medical men that dogs could
convey rabies even without showing symptoms. The incubation period for
rabies can be up to 285 days. Anyone having a dog bite from any aroused
dog would have to fear going mad at some point in the next nine months.
Many U.S. doctors expressed skepticism about the efficacy of the Pasteur
treatment for rabies. Among ordinary people it was known to involve 16
very painful injections.
But by the late 1920s the incidence of death from rabies had about doubled
in a decade, although possibly this was a statistical artifact caused by the low
incidence in the 1910s and the swelling of the U.S. population.8 By the late
1920s there were about 100 human deaths per year from the disease in the
USA, but there were some hot-spots around New York
In the earlier part of this [20th] century, New Jersey had a large
problem with canine rabies. In 1939, the worst year for recorded
cases of dog rabies, 675 dogs and four humans died of rabies.9
So the fear of rabid dogs was there to be exploited in fiction. However there
only appears to be one instance in which Lovecraft has a dog directly
associated with terror, despite his known distaste for dogs and his love of
cats. This instance is of course in the The Hound (1922), a story which
was possibly intended only as a flamboyant self-satire for his friends
The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a
nameless deed in the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in
terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the
foulest previous crime of the neighborhood. In a squalid thieves den
an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which
left no trace, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep,
insistent note as of a gigantic hound. The Hound.
Rabies was eradicated in Britain in 1902, and then again most famously in
1922 after a four-year outbreak caused by dogs smuggled past the
quarantine in 1918. One wonders if the good news in 1922 from his beloved
British Isles might have set Lovecraft to thinking on threatening dogs?
Although personal experience, the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and the 1921
movie version of The Hound of the Baskervilles might seem more obvious
inspirations for The Hound. Possibly it was the very success of the famous
The Hound of the Baskervilles and its film versions which prevented the
general use of more dogs in horror in the early 20th century.10
Lovecraft the veteran walker was probably naturally wary of dogs, especially
on his more rural walks when the dogs encountered might be fiercer and
larger, and appear in groups. One wonders if he may have taken a cane or
Although see my anthology Demon Dogs for a choice selection of the few horror and
supernatural stories that did escape the dog-catcher.
10
202
Wayne Curtis, Pimp My Walk, The Smart Set, Drexel University, 2013.
12
Ibid
13
Letter from Kirk, in Lovecrafts New York Circle, Hippocampus Press, 2006, p.225.
14
15
16
17
Kenneth W. Faig Jr, The Providence Amateur Press Club, 1914-1916, Moshassuck Press, 2008.
Credit for photographs: the yearbook The Comrade, published April 1912, scanned for
Southern New England Irish by Susan Clement & Linda Rogers at www.rootsweb.ancestry.com
2
205
Class of Providence R.I. Evening High School 1912. Here are Miller (top row), and
Byland (middle row) and Kern (front row).
207
Caroline Miller
Frederick A. Byland
Eugenie M. Kern
208
John T. Dunn.
209
The Editorial Board of Providence R.I. Evening High School Yearbook, The
Comrade, published in April 1912. Dunn (centre) Editor-in-Chief, flanked by
Miller and with Basinet behind him.
Caroline Miller
210
211
212
who worked for national publishers. She was married to Howard B. Grose
(b. 1851), who wrote slum missionaries books on immigration such as Aliens
or Americans? (1906) and The Incoming Millions (1906 Second Edition) both
of which are now available online as digital facsimiles. Meant as primers for
junior missionaries into the immigrant areas of America, taken together these
two books appear to form virtually a complete high-school primer and study
course on Lovecrafts race fears. Complete with study questions at the end of
each chapter, in Aliens or Americans? One wonders if this was the sort of
Christian race literature the teenage Lovecraft encountered during his
mysterious teen years with the Mens Club of the First Universalist Church
of Providence? Aliens or Americans? is introduced with this poem from
Thomas Bailey Aldrich an example of how Lovecraft was certainly not
alone in his fear of the Eastern hordes and what gods they might bring to
America
UNGUARDED GATES
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild, motley throng
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Celt, and Slav,
Flying the old worlds poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are these,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
216
Encyclopedia states nothing is known about Croft other than her address at
343 West Main St., North Adams, Mass. and that she appeared
sporadically in the amateur press. However Crofts was traced through the
Adams city directories in The Fossil #341, July 2009, in Kenneth W. Faig,
Jr.s article The strange story of Poetry and the Gods by Anna Helen
Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe. Other details were also found. An obituary
and further details were later unearthed and published in The Fossil #344,
April 2010. Donovan K. Loucks in 2010 photographed her house and grave
which shows her as Anna Helen Crofts McCuen (1889-1975), who married
Joseph B. McCuen (1879-1963).
Given the biographical materials so far discovered on Crofts, Lovecraft
presumably collaborated on Poetry and the Gods in the summer before
Crofts took up a new salaried job in teaching. I have dug up the press notice
of her appointment and salary, in the North Adams Transcript of 9th June
1920, with her appointment presumably being for the Sept 1920 term
217
This appears to have been her first substantial teaching post, judging from
the dates in the obituary. I have also found that Crofts published several
articles in Vocational Guidance magazine (organ of the National Vocational
Guidance Association). One of her articles was titled Guidance versus
Knights of the Road (1932).
More interestingly, I have also found some of the titles of her other fiction
or poetry, as listed in The FictionMags Index
Le Silent, (short story), The Tryout Feb 1918.
To Autumn, (poem), The Vagrant Jun 1918.
War Literature, (article), The Tryout Apr 1919.
Ive encountered no mention of her story Le Silent online, but the title
makes it sound as if it might have been of interest to Lovecraft. Faig
wonders why Lovecraft collaborated with her, and suggests i) her election as
an officer of the United amateur movement in July 1920 and ii) the striking
blank verse extracts she borrowed (uncredited) from Elizabeth J. Coatsworth
to adorn Poetry and the Gods. Lovecraft had two poems (A Winter
Wish and Laeta: A Lament) in the same Feb 1918 Tryout issue, and so (if
The FictionMags Index is correct, and they havent mis-labelled a poem as a
story), he would have seen her earlier work. Perhaps Le Silent is why he
collaborated with her? The story Le Silent doesnt appear to be online, nor
is it collected anywhere that I can find details for.
The article by Faig in The Fossil #341 reports one other story by her, but it
is not Le Silent
S.T. Joshi credits Miss Crofts with at least one further story in the
amateur press, Life (United Amateur, June 1921).
I cannot find online details of that story either, and neither Life nor Le
Silent appears to be available online or collected. Nor can I find any trace of
them being described or dismissed by Lovecraftians.
218
1917. But I have found two further appearances. The first was in the
Cambridge Chronicle of 6th January 1917, possibly with new biographical
details in the introduction
219
The same poem appeared again in The Cambridge Tribune on 13th January
1917, under the simple title Phillips Gamwell, this time with a fine
photograph of cousin Phillips pictured by the Byrd Studio photographers.
221
I then looked back through the digital archives of the Cambridge newspapers
for more on Phillips Gamwell, finding an instance in The Cambridge Tribune
of 2nd January 1904. The newspaper informs readers that Phillips Gamwell
was then visiting Providence Lovecraft was then age 13, Phillips aged
around 6. We might picture the older Lovecraft showing the younger boy
the spooky darkened attic, full of old 18th century books. I also found a
picture of Gamwell in the 7th May 1904 issue (previous page): in this picture
Phillips Gamwell rather resembles the young Lovecraft, seen below
Lovecraft in 1895
222
was written before late November 1927 since at that time Lovecraft
commented on the apparently completed text, in a letter that he wrote
to Clark Ashton Smith.1
The History was first 2 published circa 1937, as a pamphlet from
Wilson H. Shepherds Rebel Press.3 Arkham House reprinted it in
their second major Lovecraft book collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep
(1943). Then they printed it again, seemingly with additional
I have drawn up some data on the celebrated & unmentionable Necronomicon H.P.
Lovecraft, Selected Letters II, p.201.
2 The Chaosium collection The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous
Tome of the Mad Arab (2002) notes that duplicate holograph typescripts of the text were: privately
circulated among his writer friends by HPL soon after he wrote it in 1927. I regret that I have
been unable to see more from this book.
3 H.P. Lovecraft and Wilson H. Shepherd (1937). History and Chronology of the
Necronomicon, The Rebel Press, 1937. S.T. Joshi states that this was a Limited Memorial
edition, and so must have appeared shortly after Lovecrafts death in 1937, although it is
commonly listed in bibliographies as appearing in 1936. Such small fannish publishing ventures
were notorious for appearing late.
223
4 History and Chronology of the Necronomicon, Together with some Pertinent Paragraphs,
Arkham Sampler, Winter 1948.
5 Sheldon Jaffery (1982), Horrors and unpleasantries: a bibliographical history & collectors price guide to
Arkham House. Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
6
I also have a memory of reading the History when I was a youth. The UK Panther Books fan
website has contents lists suggesting that my Panther paperbacks would not have contained the
History, so possibly it was a book had from a local library? Perhaps I was lucky enough to
consult a library copy of the Greenwood Press book H.P. Lovecraft Companion (1977).
7 The word is used in Robert Reginald, et al. (1979), Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature: a
checklist, volume 2, p.848. Reginalds source is a first-hand memoir by the owner of Mirage. Im
told that a limit of 600 copies was placed on the press by August Derleth at Arkham House.
8
(2003) which has an annotated version of the History,9 but like all
of the above reprintings I am currently unable to consult the Files
book due to the cost involved.
More recently the History was published in translation, along with
scholarly notes in Italian, in a 2007 book by Sebastiano Fusco.10 This
is available in print only, and has not yet been translated into English.
I have not seen this book, and I cant read Italian.
Lovecraft states that this name was invented and given to him as a boy either by his family
lawyer or by himself. It was meant as a commentary on the young Lovecrafts love of Andrew
Langs version of the Arabian Nights tales, and Lovecafts all-round voracious appetite for reading
the idea of all has read becoming transmuted into Alhazred. See: S.T. Joshi, David E.
Schultz (2001), An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p.186. This explains why the name Abdul Alhazred
or AlHazred makes no sense in terms of known Arab naming conventions. S.T. Joshi suggests a
more meaningful version of the name would be Abd-el-Hazred.
11
I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who
dreamed of the nameless city: That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons
even death may die. from The Nameless City (1921).
13 On the origin and etymology of the word, see my text A note on the origin and derivation
of Necronomicon, in the book Lovecraft in Historical Context (2010).
14 The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned a
strangely scented candle before it. We read much in Alhazreds Necronomicon about its properties,
and about the relation of ghosts souls to the objects it symbolised; and were disturbed by what
we read. from The Hound (1922). Elsewhere in the same story Alhazred is described as
the old Arab daemonologist. A daemonologist is someone who studies beliefs about demons,
or who (in fiction) studies the actual demons themselves.
15 when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, [...] worst of all, the
unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius forbidden Latin
225
translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered
[...] I tried to read [it], and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that
accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness. from
The Festival (1923).
16 Of the [Cthulhu] cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of
Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the
European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really
hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose...
from The Call of Cthulhu (1926).
17
I believe the information in this was somewhat updated by the last sections of S.T. Joshis I
Am Providence (2011).
18
19
There are several editions of this. At 2012 the latest edition is the 2008 third edition.
226
20 The Arabic word Maazif refers to an ensemble of open stringed musical instruments, such as
a group of barbiton (i.e.: an ancient type of small and somewhat phallic-shaped upright lute,
closely associated with wine drinking and wine poetry) see: E.J. Brills First Encyclopaedia of Islam,
1913-1936. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1976) also gives azif as a name for a
player or performer of Arabian stringed musical instruments. In Arabic the -azf of something
refers to its particular implied-musical sound, and is broadly related to the idea of a sound being
distracting (like insects) or pleasurable (like music). Today, Arab society tends... to equate the
Arabic word maazif with [any] musical instruments from the Arab News, 14th July 2003. The
ancient use is confirmed in an article by Abu Bilal Mustafa Al-Kanadi:
As-sihaah [i.e.: the first dependable ancient dictionary, written by al-Jawhari (d. circa
1002)], asserts that maazif signifies musical instruments, al-aazif indicates one who sings
from the article Music and Singing in the Light of the Quran and Sunnah, Islam
World, January 2008.
Al Azif, in the ancient desert Arabic of Alhazreds time, thus appears to mean something like The
Performer or The Singer.
However I can find no mention of specific Arabian folk beliefs related to the sounds of insects.
Specifically, no nomadic Arab association of desert insect sounds with howling jinn (powerful
genie-like deamons); or with the afriit (also called afreet or ifrit a mischievous solo creature,
similar but far less powerful than a jinn, and probably best likened to the imps of the jinn); or
with the wider cultural belief in ghouls or ghls. These categories of spirit are often confused and
even chaotically jumbled in Arabic culture. They have also been subject to wild elaboration over
time by the highly superstitious settled populations, and they appear to have been variously
confused in western translations of the literature and in the many first-hand reports that arose
from the western experiences of Empire. On the ghls, which may interest Lovecraft readers the
most, see: Ahmed Al-Rawi, The Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture, Cultural Analysis, Vol. 8,
2009. Ethnologists suggest that the modern Bedouin appear to understand ghls as being
confined to graveyards and ruins. But none of these types of spirit seem to have any relevance to
night-time insect noises.
There is nothing relevant to be found, on insect folklore, in comprehensive modern books such
as Folk Traditions of the Arab World: a Guide to Motif Classification (1995). Nor is there anything much
in the readily available historical literature, except for some possibly-relevant folklore concerning
locusts although I regret I have not been able to examine Edward Westermarcks book The
Belief in Spirits in Morocco (1920) or his Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan civilization (1933). But the
following is given in Natural History of Arabia: Insects, by Andrew Crichton in his The History of
Arabia: ancient and modern (1843):
The noise they [a swarm of locusts] make in flying is like the rush of a waterfall, and
is stuns the inhabitants with fear and astonishment [...]
The medieval Arabian word for swarming locusts was arbeh. There appears to have been no
specific Arabian word for the actual noise made by swarming locusts, although their sound is said
227
to be able to be heard from great distances as the locust swarm rides the night wind. The sound
of a mass of flying locusts is likened in ancient literature to cavalry chariots moving in secret, and
Arab folk traditions were said to liken the physical form of locusts to that of little horses. It
thus appears to me rather unlikely that there is any connection of azif to locusts, or any
connection between locusts and a theoretical folk tradition about howling daemons. The
Arabian understanding of locusts clearly seems to have drawn on martial themes, rather than on
supernatural conceptions.
There is however, one interesting connection of locusts with pre-Islamic cult beliefs, which is
also given in Crichton (1843):
They [locusts] arrive toward the end of May, when the Pleiades [a star constellation]
are setting, which leads the natives to suppose that the insects entertain a dread of that
constellation [...]
The above information on locusts and the Pleiades appears to have come to Crichton via John
Lewis Burckhardts Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys (1830), which would place the folklore
directly in the traditions of nomadic Arabs rather than settled city Arabs. According to Joseph
Henningers Studies on Islam: pre-Islamic Bedouin Religion (1981), there was once a pre-Islamic cult of
the Pleiades among the nomads of Arabia. The lore based around the positions and intersections
of the Pleiades (a constellation deemed beneficent by the nomadic Arabs) is reportedly still
exercised among the modern Bedouin, where it is a proven form of natural weather calendar
during the colder seasons.
The Pleiades star cluster is also known in the West as the Seven Sisters. In H.P. Lovecrafts
The Whisperer in Darkness (1930) he has cultists appear to allude to the Seven Sisters as an
abode or location of Nyarlathotep:
To Nyarlathotep, mighty messenger must all things be told. And he shall put on the
semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides and come down from the
world of seven suns to mock... from The Whisperer in Darkness.
The star Aldebaran (from the Arabic: Al Dabaran, meaning the follower) appears to follow
the Pleiades in the night sky, and this star was later given a role in the Lovecraft mythos by
Lovecrafts acolytes. For instance, Derleth refers to Celaeno, a planet around a star in the
Pleiades cluster, which in Derleths fiction contains a library of stolen knowledge. Aldebaran also
has a central place in The King in Yellow, mentioned by Lovecraft at the very end of The History
of the Necronomicon.
21 There is or was a very fearsome although apparently soundless insect of the desert
night:
another venomous insect, resembling a spider, which infests the desert, is that to
which the Bedouins give the name abou hanekein [...] it makes its appearance only at
night, and is attracted by fire. The Arabs entertain the greatest dread of them from
Natural History of Arabia: Insects, by Andrew Crichton, in his The History of Arabia:
ancient and modern (1843).
Crichtons source here is Johann Ludwig Burckhards first-hand account of encountering the
creature, given in his Travels in Syria and the Holy Land (1822), p.598 although Burckhard calls it
a reptile like a spider and identifies it as Galeode phalangiste based on illustrations seen in
Travels in the Ottoman Empire (1801). Burckhard notes no sound or folklore associated with the
creature.
22 This overall notion clearly originates in Western orientalist fantasy literature, specifically with
William Beckfords The History of Caliph Vathek (1784), in the Henley edition which was well
known to Lovecraft:
228
The good Mussulmans [i.e.: Moslems] fancied that they heard the sullen hum of
those nocturnal insects which presage evil, and importuned Vathek to beware how he
ventured his sacred person. from Vathek.
An explanatory footnote to this is given by Samuel Henley, who suggests that:
the nocturnal sound called by the Arabians azif was believed to be the howling of
demons.
This note was given by Lovecraft as being his source, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith of 27th
November 1927:
Azif is a real word. I cribbed it out of Henleys learned notes to Vathek
I have only found one print source that could account for Henleys notion: John Richardsons
A New Vocabulary Persian, Arabic and English (1810) lists azif as: Howling in the desert. The noise
of thunder (p.390). Possibly this was an early western misunderstanding of al-aazif, meaning the
desert singer or the performer. But more likely it was a confused western rendering of irziz (the
sound of thunder) and azis (rolling or bubbling thunder) as azif. Although perhaps there was even
a pre-Islamic shamanic conflation, in which a good campfire singer was deemed one who was
able to summon up and control the voice of the thunder and the desert winds? I also wonder if
the devout orthodox Muslims of Henleys time understood the music of the Sufi mystics, or even
music in general, as being the howling of demons? Yet I can find no evidence for either idea, at
least in the western sources.
Incidentally, the alternative Grimditch Vathek gives a similar rendering to that of Henley:
Many good Mussulmans, thinking that these sounds proceeded from those
nocturnal insects which presage evil, besought Vathek to beware lest harm should befall
his sacred person. from the Grimditch translation of Vathek.
There were a long line of inspirations for Vathek, as has been pointed out in Darrell Schweitzer
in his Some Ancestors of Vathek (Crypt of Cthulhu, No.30, April 1985). Rather than the
beginning of a tradition:
Vathek comes at the end of a long tradition, that of the pseudo-Oriental moralistic
tale [and Beckford] transcended what was by his time an already long-established and
moribund genre.
This raises the further possibility there may be some source, in these earlier western literary texts,
for Henleys specific claim about azif and insects and daemons? Perhaps there was even some
western literary confabulation that was based on the howling to the Rifaiyah sufi mystics
known in the West as howling dervishes and who were outlawed in 1925. Western travellers
of the 19th century reported that the fearsome howling of these crazed sufi dervishes could rival
that of wolves. They were, however, a lesser sect confined largely to Syria and modern Turkey.
23
229
At the time Alhazred is said to have visited Memphis, it was a ruin like Babylon. In the 7th
century the Arabs took possession and plundered the ruins of Memphis, to obtain building
material for a new city nearby. The city was vast, however, and many subterranean secrets must
have long remained there and probably still remain today. An Arab visitor of the 13th century
wrote after visiting the ruined city:
[even after] all that more than four thousand years have done in addition to man,
these ruins still offer to the eye of the beholder a mass of marvels which bewilder the
senses and which the most skillful pens must fail to describe. The more deeply we
contemplate this city the more our admiration rises, and every fresh glance at the ruins
is a fresh source of delight [...] The ruins of Memphis hold a half-days journey in every
direction. Abd-ul-Latif, given in: Emile Isambert, Itinraire descriptif, historique et
archologique de lOrient (1881), p.1009.
Lovecrafts The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927) has a mention of that Darke Thing
belowe Memphis.
29 A 250,000 square-mile and largely unexplored desert region, now called the Rub al Khali
although Donald Cole points out in his book Bedouins of the Empty Quarter (2010) that this is not a
name known to the modern Bedouin there. It was first explored by two small-scale British
explorations in the early 1930s. During one of these Harry St. John Bridger Philby (1886-1960)
inadvertently documented a strange sonic phenomenon of the desert in the Rub al Khali, namely
the singing sands, which may have some bearing on the idea of the howling of daemons:
Quite suddenly the great amphitheatre [containing a rare desert well] began to boom
and drone with a sound not unlike that of a siren or perhaps an aeroplane engine
quite a musical pleasing rhythmic sound of astonishing depth. Only once before, near
Medina, had Philby heard singing sands, and then far off. Now they were near at hand,
and were, of course, attributed by his [Arab] companions to jinns [powerful daemons];
230
Philby soon saw that they were caused by a sand-slide set off by one of the men who
had climbed the slope. This deduction he confirmed by manipulating the orchestra;
while doing so, he plunged downhill and knelt on the singing mass; here he noticed a
deep, sucking sound as he pulled hand or knee out of the slope, and felt a curious but
unmistakable sensation of a pulsing and throbbing below the surface, as in a mild
earthquake. from Across the Rub Al-Khali, Saudi Aramco Magazine,
November/December 1973. For a full account of the journey see Philbys 1933 book
The Empty Quarter: being a description of the great south desert of Arabia known as Rub al Khali.
Only in 2006 was a proper large-scale scientific survey of this immense region finally undertaken.
30 Actually the name for a narrow strip of rolling sand hills that form the boundary between
central and eastern Arabia. See: Donald Cole (2010), Bedouins of the Empty Quarter .
31 Possibly so called because the women of the tribes living in parts of it, who used (and
possibly still use) local dyes to create a vivid crimson dami cloth. See: James P. Mandavilles
Bedouin Ethnobotany: Plant Concepts and Uses in a Desert Pastoral World (2011), p.142.
32 This passage appears to be a borrowing by Lovecraft, from the 1902 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Brittanica...
Arab fancy has attributed the additional protection of evil spirits and monsters of
death. This greater desert, the Roba el Khaliyeh or Empty Space of geographers
the Dahna or Crimson of modern Arabs [...] little or no credit can be attached
to the relations of those who pretend to have explored it, and to have found wonders
in its recesses. from the entry for Arabia: Great Southern Desert, in the 1902
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
33 Again, this passage was basically borrowed from the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Of this
vast desert, the Britannica states...
it is never traversed in its full width, not even by Bedouins; and little or no credit can
be attached to the relations of those who pretend to have explored it, and to have
found wonders in its recesses. from the entry for Arabia: Great Southern Desert,
in the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
This desert was deemed impenetrable and intensely hostile by Alhazreds time, even without the
presence of the alleged monsters of death. To spend ten years alone there, as Lovecraft
suggests that Alhazred did, implies that by that time Alhazred had gained considerable occult
powers, or else was treated as some kind of holy hermit and therefore looked after by local tribes.
It is true that some frankincense trade routes were once able to completely cross this desert, but
that was only until about the 300s (although it may have been the sharp and sudden decline in the
frankincense trade due to changing fashions among consumers, rather than desertification, which
actually caused these routes to become disused).
At the heart of the Rub al Khali was said to lie the fabled city of Irem, a sort of Arabian
equivalent to Atlantis or the Garden of the Hesperides. In The Call of Cthulhu (1926),
Lovecraft has Castro speculate that this lost city may be the centre of the Cthulhu cult:
231
In the beliefs of Arabian nomads the jinn and their lesser variants are invisible or hidden
creatures ... resembling humans but free from physical limitations and they can thus shapeshift. They are especially threatening to men... when they [men] are entirely absorbed in singing
at the [camp] fire during the long Saharan nights, since they bring them to ecstasy and cause them
to fall to the ground frothing at the mouth all quotes from a summary of the historic beliefs
that draws on Arabic sources, given by Ewa Machut-Mendecka, Witchcraft and sorcery in the
prose of Ibrahim al-Kuni IN: Studies in Arabic and Islam: Proceedings of the 19th Congress, 2002,
p.236. Possibly the high prevalence of epilepsy, caused by consanguinity, is a scientific
explanation for this phenomenon since the musical beat and flickering flames of the campfire
may induce an epileptic fit.
38
39 The possible implication here is that one of the monsters of death of the Rub al Khali has
followed Alhazred, or perhaps been summoned, from out of the empty desert.
40
certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race
older than mankind.41 He was only an indifferent Moslem,42
invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some
heaven-favoured traveler. from the Arabia entry, 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The Arab Sufi belief was that Irem (Irem, Zhat al Imad) was a magical garden-city constructed in
the immense desert by the powers of the jinn (i.e.: Arabian genies, daemons with superhuman
powers) under human direction. The human rulers of the city dared to believe themselves to be
divine, and so before they could reach it their garden-city was erased from sight by a noise from
God. But the city still stands invisible and untouched in the desert, where God sometimes
permits a traveller to catch a glimpse of it and so be reminded of the perils of hubris. The story
and belief has been given or mentioned in the West a number of times: notably by The Thousand
and One Nights; Omar Khayyams Rubaiyat; Washington Irving in Tales of the Alhambra (1851,
revised); and vividly and at length in Henry Iliowizis The Weird Orient (1900). The tales of Irem
appears to have inspired Lovecrafts story The Nameless City (1921), although he is careful in
his story to show that the city being explored is even older than Irem: one terrible final scene
shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem.
There may perhaps have been some Sufi traditions of dream travel to the city of Irem and its
fabulous gardens, but I can find no mention of this in the western scholarly literature. One
western sufist claims that Irem is very important to Sufi beliefs, but this may be a modern
confabulation.
The notion of a mysterious lost place which is simultaneously half in and half out of the real
world is one that seems relevant to Lovecrafts conception of the Dreamlands and also of Kadath.
The notion of travelling to an exotic city created by daemons, but never arriving there, also seems
relevant to Lovecrafts projected novel Azathoth (1922). Also relevant to the idea of
Lovecrafts shape-shifting Shoggoths is that jinn and their variants are credited with the same
abilities. Avicenna (d. 1037) defined the jinn as...
Airy animals capable of changing themselves into different forms quote by
Avicenna, given in Duncan Black Macdonalds undated online scholarly essay:
Intercourse Through the Jinn; Spirits, Demons, and Ghosts in Islam.
There are also lesser deamons of the desert night which are called afriit or afreet (numerous
spellings are used). In modern Bedouin belief these impish creatures mischievously taunt men
with owl-like calls, and take on the appearance of animals or humans in order to lead men into
lonely places, whereupon the afriit impishly vanishes. See: Joseph J. Hobbs (1992), Bedouin Life in
the Egyptian Wilderness, University of Texas Press, p.60. In the western historical literature these
beings are said to be more fantastical: to be larger; to dwell underground; to have wings; and to be
made of fire like the jiin. The source for these over-heated descriptions might appear to be the
more superstitious settled Arab populations, who have an absolute dread of the desert and its
beings, since the Bedouin who actually live in the desert are significantly less credulous. Note that
the name afriit does not appear to be the root of the modern affright, which is claimed to have its
root in the ancient Northumbrian (the far north of modern England) fyrhtu.
41 Very possibly a reference to Lovecrafts own story The Nameless City (1921), in which
the lost desert ruin conceals just such remains in its lower reaches.
42 Sufi mystical asceticism had its very early and rather misty origins at about this time, and it
may be that an Abdul Alhazred would have been able to take advantage of what appears to have
been a period of relative intellectual ferment in Arabia.
233
43
950 A.D. appears to be generally deemed by Christian scholars to be the moment when the
long persecution and decline of the Christians began to end, and their rise to hegemony ushered
in the Middle Ages.
44
45 Prominent philosophers of the period from the 740s to the 950s included the famous AlKindi. The north of the British Isles also produced Bede of Northumbria, and Alcuin of York.
46 A common first name, seen in various ancient histories. Perhaps the most superficially
obvious possibility as a source is the Ancient Greek bucolic poet Theocritus, who was the student
of Philetas. He would however, be a strange choice for Lovecraft, since Theocritus wrote very
conventional poetic works and, in Theocrituss own words: I never sought after a strange muse.
234
Said to be a hotbed of occultism, although Lovecraft may not have known it in the 1920s...
Spanish historians used to argue that Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries was commendably free from magic and the occult, that what little there was
proceeded from rural ignorance [...] This rosy view has since been invalidated by
historians such as Caro Baroja, who has demonstrated the widespread participation of
Spaniards in occult practices, well-intentioned and otherwise. Early modern Spain was
no different in this respect from France, Italy or Germany... from David C.
Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology and Science in Philip IIs Spain,
Cambridge University Press, p.3.
53 Pope Gregory IX (c. 1145/70-1241) seems to have been keen on banning things in the
1230s. He banned the Jewish Talmud, for instance. His papal Vox in Rama decree of 1233
banning and damning black cats as satanic beings was long believed to have been a trigger for
wholesale cat massacres by Catholics across Europe. Lovecraft, an atheist, a devout cat lover and
a student of strange lore, can hardly have failed to note this historical nugget for future use.
A letter from Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith (27th November 1927) elaborates the point
slightly: Lovecraft states that Gregory placed the Necronomicon on the Catholic Index Expurgatorius.
The Index Expurgatorius was a list of corrections issued to update the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or
list of forbidden books. But the Popes Index Librorum Prohibitorum was not issued until 1559.
235
Latin translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original was
lost as early as Wormius time, as indicated by his prefatory note; and
no sight of the Greek copywhich was printed in Italy54 between
1500 and 1550has been reported since the burning of a certain
Salem mans library in 1692.55 An English translation made by Dr.
Dee56 was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from
the original manuscript.57 Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th
cent.) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key,58
while another (17th cent.) is in the Bibliothque Nationale at Paris.59
Probably as a consequence of Lovecraft discovering this fact, mention of the Index Expurgatorius
was omitted from the circulated version of the History.
54 The early printing revolution is generally demarcated as having happened in Europe from
1455 to 1550. By 1500 Italy had over 70 printers, although not all of these might have been
printers of books.
55 1692 was the year of the height of the Salem witchcraft trials. I can find no record of any
occult libraries being burned in New England at exactly this time. But later many of the books
that were in Cotton Mathers library were burned in Boston see Alice Morse Earles book
Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1893), p.145. Mather had had a minor role in the Salem
witch trials.
56 Doctor John Dee (1527-1608) was a real personage of early modern England, in the time of
Shakespeare. He served as Queen Elizabeth Is divine and her scientist-astrologer. He has been
widely thought to be the model for the magician Prospero in Shakespeares The Tempest (c.1610).
His occult library was extensive and renowned. His library was ransacked and dispersed by a
superstitious mob while he was in Europe. For more on Dee and Lovecraft, see my detailed essay
on the subject in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context: a third collection of essays and notes (2012).
57 This line on Dee was added to the History manuscript a little later than the body of the
text. This was done by Lovecraft so as to accommodate the use of a quote from Dees
Necronomicon, which formed the epigraph of Frank Belknap Longs story The Space Eaters
(1927), which at that time had yet to see print. The Space Eaters story was also the first to
include Lovecraft as a character. See: S.T. Joshi (2011), I Am Providence, for the details on this.
Lovecraft later used Longs Dee edition in his The Dunwich Horror (1928).
58 Lovecraft was probably thinking here of reports of the notorious locked Private Case in
which were held the forbidden books of the British Museum Library. The Private Case was
established around 1856, although there was a prior existing tradition of setting aside certain
forbidden books on their acquisition. For details on the Case, see Patrick J. Kearneys book The
Private Case: an annotated bibliography of the Private Case, 1981. The Museums Library formed as a
merger of the Camden, Harleian, Old Royal, and Sloan libraries in 1753, and it opened in 1759.
After enduring a period of neglect, by the 19th century it had become the finest library in the
world. It later merged with other British libraries to become the British Library (the equivalent
of the Library of Congress).
59 A real library. The national library of France, like the British Library or the Library of
Congress.
236
60 A real library. In 1995 the F.B.I. arrested a man for stealing several hundred rare books
about the occult from this library.
61 Neither this fictional University or the fictional town should need any introduction to
Lovecraft readers.
62 A real library. The spelling Lovecraft uses is the old one, seen in use in magazines and
books of the mid 1920s. The same spelling is used again in The Dunwich Horror (1927):
Wilbur writes to... the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris, the
British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University at
Arkham to try to obtain copies of certain pages from the Necronomicon. But why choose Buenos
Ayres? Lovecraft hardly ever mentions South America, and appears to have never mentioned
Argentina. Air tourism from America does not appear to have started at that time (see the history
book: Flying Down to Rio: Hollywood, Tourists, and Yankee Clippers). Buenos Ayres in the 1920s was
claimed to be the most culturally avant-garde city in South America Poe was popular there in
the 1900s, the writer Borges was emerging there in the mid 1920s, and the first Surrealist group
outside France was founded in the city in 1926. There was also a darker side to the city:
Lovecrafts attention might well have been drawn by reviews of the well-promoted book The
road to Buenos Ayres (1927) a campaigning account of the real-life white slave trade by which
Jewish pimps filled the brothels of the city. Perhaps there was a Machen reference to the city?
Or an occult connection which Lovecraft knew about through his Theosophist contacts...
Sances, consultations with psychic mediums, the study of theosophy and the
Kabbalah were all popular activities in Buenos Aires at the turn of the [20th] century.
David William Foster et al (1998), in Culture and Customs of Argentina, p.105.
63 Possibly this mention is related to Clark Ashton Smiths story The Return of the Sorcerer
(pub. 1931), in which scholarly American recluse John Carnby has a copy of the Necronomicon.
Perhaps Smith had communicated this notion to Lovecraft, as one he might use in a future story?
Carby is depicted by Smith as an aged scholar living in the suburbs of Oakland, who is rich
enough to employ a secretary, and he has a singularly comprehensive collection of ancient and
modern works on demonology and the black arts.
64 Richard Upton Pickman, depicted in Lovecrafts story Pickmans Model (1926), came of a
Salem family. This fact is not a new addition to Pickmans back-story, since it is given in
Pickmans Model thus: you know Pickman comes of old Salem stock. Salem was, of course,
the site of the notorious witch-trials, and there are indeed many Pickman names to be noted in
Salems historical record.
65
Chronology
Al Azif written circa 730 A.D. at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred
Tr. to Greek 950 A.D. as Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas
Burnt by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e., Greek text). Arabic text now lost.
Olaus translates Gr. to Latin 1228
1232 Latin ed. (and Gr.) suppr. by Pope Gregory IX
14... Black-letter printed edition (Germany)
15... Gr. text printed in Italy
16... Spanish reprint of Latin text
66
The early 1926 date for the setting is not given in Pickmans Model.
Lovecraft was among the first generation of human beings who were able to write and
publish in a fully open manner on religion and ideas.
67
238
239
PART TWO
Finding Lovecrafts most elusive correspondents
My great thanks to Kenneth W. Faig Jr., without whom the essays in this
section would not have been possible.
240
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft Annual 2012. p.162.
2 The parents are also given by Faig in the 2012 Lovecraft Annual. I have found that The life and
times of Samuel Gorton (1904) has a genealogic entry noting that a Martha A. Allen (b.1861) married
a Warren B. Wesley, and had a son Fredk.. This finding confirms Faigs details of Allens
parents. The father Warren B. Wesley was probably born circa 1854.
3 There is a record of a burial of a Frederick Allen Wesley at the Grace Church Cemetery,
Providence (Elmwood Ave. at Broad St.) but no dates or transcription of the stone, if any is
available, online. Kenneth W. Faig Jr.suggests a 20th April 1948 death date.
4
Rhode Island School of Design Year Book, 1903, Vols 25-28, page 69.
241
If Wesley had been born 1885 then it follows that in 1903 he would have
been of the right age to have been an 18 year old student at the Rhode Island
School of Design (RISD).
One of his key teachers would have been Stacy Tolman of Providence
(1860-1935). Tolman had been head of the dept. of drawing and painting at
the Rhode Island School of Design since 1889. Tolman remained as such
until 1905, thereafter teaching the anatomy class. His presence there is very
interesting because he made an ink drawing5 of Wesley, which is still extant
though not yet inspected by Lovecraftians
Rhode Island Historical SocietyGraphics Dept.:
ACCESS RESTRICTED. APPOINTMENT REQUIRED
1. Ink drawing, Frederick Allen Wesley (call# Graphics XXB Painting T652 1)
5 Listed in Elinor L. Nacheman, 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, self published 2007.
6 The place seems to have served as a rooming house for creative types, as well as artists
studios. It seems to have been what would now be termed a creative hub. Lovecraft once had an
amusing and productive run-in with the literary editor of the Providence Journal Bertrand K. Hart,
over Harts having once lived at that address. See the entry on Hart in the Lovecraft Encylopedia.
7 This, of course, is the building which famously features in Lovecrafts The Call of Cthulhu.
Also called - - Lis in the art history literature.
242
8 The Call of Cthulhu memorably mentions a Paris art salon and the shocking painting
shown there. In this respect it is interesting that...
Last year [2006] the Boston Museum of Fine Arts documented the exodus of artists
to Paris ateliers in the exhibit Americans in Paris, 1860 - 1900. [...] many Rhode Island
19th artists did their art training abroad [in Paris] at the Julian Academy and the Ecole
des Beaux Arts working hard to gain acceptance into Paris Salon exhibits Catherine
Little Bert, from the description of the exhibition Rhode Island Artists in 19th
Century Paris Salons at the Bert Gallery in Providence, 2007.
9 7 Thomas Street, formerly Angells Lane, the building still standing today. Designed by
Charles Walter Stetson and Sydney Richmond Burleigh in collaboration with architects Stone,
Carpenter, and Willson. One of its two designers Stetson referred to the building as a ... unique
and mysterious domain of art ... a building misunderstood by the people, disliked by the perfectly
modern and neat, and beloved by us who harbour there from The Studio, Charles Walter
Stetson, unidentified Providence press cutting quoted in the book Charles Walter Stetson: color and
fantasy (1982). For a history of Thomas Street see the free online book Angells Lane, The History of
a Little Street in Providence (1948).
10
If this reflects something of Frederick Allen Wesley then he might seem a suitable Providence
friend for Lovecraft. The lack of any letters between them might be explained by the fact that
they met face-to-face.
243
putting his friends into his stories.11 One wonders if the extant Tolman
portrait of Wesley will, when unearthed, show something of Lovecrafts
description of Wilcox as a
thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect
However, it also may be that Wilcoxs physical appearance was modeled
more after a photograph of a real pagan artist from Providence. One who
was rejected by the Providence art world, in the same manner as Wilcox is
rejected in Lovecrafts The Call of Cthulhu
William H. Gerdts, Art across America: two centuries of regional painting, 1710-1920, Vol.1, p.97.
14
Mary Armfield Hill (Ed.), Endure: the diaries of Charles Walter Stetson, Temple University Press,
1985.
244
had been rejected by Providences art world. Or Lovecraft may have heard of
Stetson via Providences systems of oral memory, into which his educated
aunts were no doubt closely integrated.
Given the evidence presented, I suspect that the Wilcox in The Call of
Cthulhu was broadly modeled on Stetsons pagan vision in art, but was
covertly named for Lovecrafts Providence friend Frederick A. Wesley.15
Stetson, in his later life, fits with Lovecrafts description of Wilcox as
Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually
from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of
esthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to
preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless. (The Call
of Cthulhu).
In later life Stetson, indeed shunned by others due to his deafness as well as
his approach to art, was befriend by Elihu Vedder (1836-1923), the major
mystical symbolist painter.16 There was a memorial exhibition for Stetson in
1912 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,17 at which the 22 year old
Lovecraft could have seen weird works by Stetson such as these:
Art across America: two centuries of regional painting, 1710-1920, Volume 1, p.97.
There appears to be no review of this show available online, but its description in Eldredge,
Charles Walter Stetson: color and fantasy makes it sound quite impressive. Stetsons concern for
atmosphere and foreboding eerie landscapes much have touched something in Lovecraft, had he
seen the exhibition.
17
246
247
18 Given in Steven J. Mariconda, The Emergence of Cthulhu, Lovecraft Studies 15 (Fall 1987),
p.54.
249
her first husband was the Providence artist Stetson. She always
had an affected, eccentric streak of self-conscious intellectuality19
Stetson had asked the author Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) to
marry him, which she did in 1884 and it seems that she promptly went mad.
She recovered and her later story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is a classic
gothic tale of madness, and this was a tale known and strongly admired by
Lovecraft.
Stacy Tolman
between Lovecraft and the Providence art world. Tolmans interesting early
works of the late 1880s show a lost Providence of artists and musicians in
rooftop rooms and studios. Below is Tolmans The Etcher (c.1887-90),
which has a rather Lovecraftian atmosphere about it
The man depicted is the printmaker William Henry Warren Bicknell, Tolmans
friend and fellow student.
251
Sadly it appears that this b&w image is the only public copy of The
Interlude. One wonders if it hung somewhere public in Providence during
Lovecrafts time, and that he saw it?
252
Tolmans late work, presumably made in the 1920s, apparently showed the
evidence of impressionism.20
Finally, here is a picture of a typical studio in the Fleur de Lys building,
showing another artist (Wilfred Israel Duphiney, painting Commodore John
Barry) but evocative of the likely nature of Tolmans studio
253
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft Annual 2012. p.162. Lovecraft had
another down under correspondent, probably briefly, one Robert George Barr of New Zealand,
an amateur journalist who included Lovecrafts Yoggoth poem Harbour Whistles in his The
Silver Fern (May 1930). Barr does not appear in the H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, but is mentioned as a
correspondent in Leigh Blackmores Leon Stone: Amateur Journalist and Pioneer Lovecraft
Collector, The Fossil, Volume 105, Number 3.
2
254
255
4 Presented to the State Library of New South Wales, by Mrs G. Fitzpatrick, 1949, where it
held today. The collection is titled Australian bookplates, pre 1949, but given his calls to
America it likely also contains many from America.
256
One thus suspects that Lovecraft sent Fitzpatrick a few samples of his new
bookplate for his collection, thus sparking a correspondence. Perhaps a
researcher would find Lovecrafts bookplate if they went looking in the
Fitzpatrick collection?
Fitzpatrick was indeed reaching out to America at exactly the right time to
encounter Lovecraft and his new bookplate
The collection [of bookplates] probably belonged to George
Fitzpatrick, editor [actually possibly only a Director] of the Sydney
Sunday Times. Fitzpatrick made a request for copies of book plates
of prominent people in The Milwaukee Journal May 18th 1929 p.6,
Book plates wanted5
Damian John Gleeson, George William Sydney Fitzpatrick (1884 1948): An Australian
Public Relations pioneer, Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal, 2013, Volume 13, No. 2.
6
257
similar notice from him in Plain Talk (1929), and another in Time magazine
(13th May 1929) in which he notes
Already I am obligated by able assistance so graciously given by
such fine [then famous literary] folk as Mencken, Theodore Dreiser,
Fannie Hurst, Frank OBrien
Minister of New Zealand, who had worked himself up to that position from
being a humble telegraph boy. He married in 1910.7 By 1920 he was
involved in many charitable and boosterist campaigns for his state. An
academic journal article on Fitzpatrick as a PR man, by Damian John
Gleeson, was published in 2013. Gleeson notes that
He was a member of the Australian Journalists Association, and
became editor and also part-owner of newspapers, including being
deputy governor of the Sunday Times and director of the [sports
paper] Referee.
His [post 1929] PR campaigns, grounded in research trips to
America and Europe in the 1930s, reflected considerable
understanding of the science of persuasion to influence public
opinion.
He does appear to have visited America in the 1930s,8 and was reportedly a
very genial friend9 of American capitalism. The journal article by Gleeson
7 Probably to a Jessie J. Browne. See Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft
Annual 2012. p.167.
8 Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. notes a September 1934 ship disembarkation record for him at San
Francisco. Its not known if he made it to the East Coast of the USA.
258
hardly mentions his wartime activities, but I have found evidence that
Fitzpatrick later used his American contacts to become a key conduit of
digests of American commercial news to the Australian government and
other members of the press during the Second World War.10 This news may
have been especially important because
Australian import licence restrictions [were] applied in 1940,
effectively banning United States publications from our shores11
Like Lovecraft Fitzpatrick was a strong British patriot
From his father, Fitzpatrick inherited strong patriotic sentiment
towards the British Empire.12
He might even have had some Theosophical connections, since I have
found that he corresponded with the William Quan Judge Theosophical
9
10 Ross Fitzgerald, Stephen Holt, Alan The Red Fox Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, NewSouth,
2010, p.35.
11 The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy, Melbourne University Press, 1988.
p.46. Leigh Blackmore has an unpublished 500 word draft on Weird Tales in Australia (1992)
in his bibliography, but it is not available online. It appears, judging from his summary of it, to
focus on the post-war period
Brief history of wartime shortages and bans, which made the pulp magazine difficult
to obtain here. Unfinished; need to track down older SF fans to discuss their memories
(Graham Stone etc).
This implies that the magazine Weird Tales may have been easier to obtain in the 1930s in
Australia. The American pulps were banned in Australia, via the Customs (Literature Censorship)
Regulations 1937, but only from 1939 or 1940 (sources differ on the date it came into effect)
In 1939 the Australian government had established tariffs on American imports that
effectively banned American pulps from Tony Johnson-Woods, The Mysterious
Case of Carter Brown, in Whos Who?: Hoaxes, Imposture and Identity Crises in Australian
Literature, University of Queensland Press, p.74.
Such a banning implies that the import trade in American pulps was a flourishing one in the
Australia of the 1930s. I also read elsewhere that American business magazines and journals were
also banned (or de facto?) during wartime, I would guess perhaps because of a fear they could be
smuggled to Japan? Possibly it was simply a protectionist measure meant to protect the domestic
publishing industry. However, such restrictions imply an added usefulness for FitzPatricks
summaries of U.S. commercial news during wartime.
12
Upper House of New South Wales. Hugh D. McIntosh had made his name
and fortune in theatres with lavish revues, plays and musicals, and
McIntosh later dabbled in exotic spiritual cinema
With colourful Canadian entrepreneur J.D. Williams he
contracted with Rudolph Valentino to star in the film The Hooded
13 From Messenger to Director: a successful Australian, Evening Post, Volume C, Issue 152,
24th December 1920, p.2.
260
14
Hugh D. McIntosh 1876-1942, entry in the Live Performance Australia online encyclopaedia.
From Messenger to Director: a successful Australian, Evening Post, Volume C, Issue 152,
24th December 1920, p.2.
15
16
Hugh D. McIntosh 1876-1942, entry in the Live Performance Australia online encyclopaedia.
261
K
1
Annual 2012.
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft Annual 2012. p.162.
The record for his 1922 book on Archive.org.
262
3 Now widely and freely available in digital form online. Lovecraft had the five volume set in
his personal library.
263
Treftisis.4 I can find no trace of any title called A Roamer in Lyonesse, nor
any work on Lyonesse from 1922 to 1935 under any likely name. Possibly
the book was anticipated for 1922, but never appeared. Perhaps it was
turned into a series of articles, and a search of Theosophist magazines and
the like might turn up something? Possibly it needed revision work, and if so
then the topic and setting would have been directly in Lovecrafts line of
interest. Lyonesse is, of course, the Cornish/Arthurian folk story of the lost
land under the sea.
3. The manuscript of his esoteric-sounding The Eon or The Quest of the Lotus
(aka The Eonic Quest) might also have been revision work for Lovecraft. I
can find no trace of this work, under either those titles. I have found a
reference to the eonic character of the Lotus Sermon in Buddhism, so
presumably his text was one that referenced Buddhist belief.
1 We also get Replogles 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.
266
267
So, do we have any likely candidates who could have been working for
Electronic Mechanics, Inc.? Yes, we do. 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. Its perhaps not too much of
a long shot to suggest that this Myers may have made a move to being a
machinist in a new local radio2 startup in 1935, working with mineral/glass
fibres. Working with animal fibres and working with mineral/glass fibres
apparently requires similar skills.
If so, then quite how he came to know Lovecraft is still a mystery.
Electronic Mechanics, Inc. were manufacturers not retailers, so its 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
2
Radio was incredibly cool, attracting the same enthusiasm as the PCs/Web industry of today.
268
Lovecraft, and that Lovecraft had kindly written back. There is no online
trace of this Myers as any kind of author or fan writer.
269
Lovecraft Annual 2012,2 could find no-one certain for this entry in Lovecrafts
address book
Bell 15 Pine Ave., Old Orchard, Ne. c/o E. Dixon, Box 292
This address was a mistranscription by Robert Barlow. What the address was
is
Bell 15 Pine Ave., Old Orchard Be[ach], c/o E. Dixon, Box 292
This address is some 60 miles north along the coast from Providence.
There was an Edith Bell (b. 19th July 1914) who died in 2002 age 88 at Old
Orchard Beach. There is a record of her living at 22 Pine Ave.
There is an Edwin E. Dixon living at 15 Pine Ave., Old Orchard Beach, in
the 1940 Census. He died 13th Jan 1964, at Old Orchard Beach, age 75.
Presumably Edwin E. Dixon passed Lovecrafts letters to Edith Bell at 22
Pine Ave.? Since Bell was under 21 until 1935, my guess would be that
See the previous essay in this book, Geo. FitzPatrick of Sydney: Lovecrafts lost Australian
correspondent.
1
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft Annual 2012. p.162.
270
perhaps her parents didnt approve of her interest in weird literature? Hence
the need to pass letters via the fictitious(?) Box 292 of near neighbour E.
Dixon. An absolute need for discreetness would also suggest why Lovecraft
listed her simply as Bell rather than giving her full name in his address
book.
So far as I can tell from my research, neither Edith Bell or Edwin E. Dixon
ever made a mark in art, literature, or collecting that went beyond Old
Orchard Beach, at least not one that shows up online.
22 Pine Avenue has, at April 2013, recently been emptied and put up for sale. It
appears that Edith Bells relative Peter Bell had lived there until recently. If he had a
big pile of Lovecraft letters in a tin box in the basement, they might have been worth
more than the house!
Note that Edith Bell (1914-2002) is not to be confused with the person
who the local Old Orchard Beach community named their local library after:
that was one Edith Belle Libby, although its sometimes mis-named in
online documents as the Edith Bell Library.
271
I have also found an Edith Bell Love, who published a few pulp mysteryromance stories during the period 1928-1933
Heights, All-Story Love Stories, 1st Feb 1933.
Love and Mystery at Melrose, All-Story Love Stories, 15th Nov
1932.
A Tale of Two Women, Prize Story Magazine, Apr 1929.
The Mystery of the Stairs, Everygirls Magazine, date? 1928.
But I rather suspect that she was the same as the Edith Bell Love who later
became the Augusta, South Carolina, newspaper reporter in the 1930s or 40s
going through to around 1960 (when she was described as the veteran
reporter on The Augusta Chronicle). I have been unable to find an address for
her, but although Lovecraft had travelled to South Carolina and she does
appear to have had an interest in writing about local history she obviously
needed no help with revision work and was more than capable of writing for
herself.
272
The Lovecraft Encyclopaedia gives 1921, but this is corrected to 1920 in I Am Providence.
2 Louis C. Smith. S.T. Joshi states in I Am Providence (Hippocampus, 2010) that nothing is
known about Smith. See the following essay on Smith in this volume.
3 John Cheng, Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America, University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, p.62. Cheng does not say to which pulp Anger was writing here,
nor does he footnote the quote. It was not Weird Tales, but rather an SF pulp with letters pages
titled Discussions. Presumably this must have been Amazing Stories. This might suggest Anger
was a hard SF as well as a fantasy-horror fan. I have found an online indication that his letter was
published in a 1935 issue of Amazing Stories.
4
Gary Romeo, Stars of the Pulps, Sand Roughs #5, Winter Solstice, 2002.
273
274
Of course none of the above proves that the East Coast Anger is the same
as the West Coast Anger. But given the absolute disappearance of Anger
from records on the West Coast, my hypothesis would be this: that after
California fandom in the 1930s, where he apparently knew Clark Ashton
Smith personally(?), Anger served in the Navy in the 1940s. He later took
275
Of interest to future searchers after Anger will be the mention of his name in
The Typographical Journal for 1946. This lists William F. Anger in a list of
either contributions or expenditures, having against his name $300. But
this is likely to be the same as the man noted in The Typographical Journal in
a 1935 issue as
William F. Anger, age 27; at trade twelve years; worked in
Denver, Colo.; Chicago, 111., and San Jose, Cal.; never a member.
The mention of San Jose is interesting. But the age given for the man would
mean that he was born circa 1908, meaning that he cannot be Lovecrafts
Anger who in 1934/5 was in Berkley writing boyish letters to the pulps.
276
scholarship. But it seems that Smith has long been a minor mystery to
Lovecraftians. But he can now be fairly easily traced through his fannish
activities.
John Chengs Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in
Interwar America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) names Smith as
Louis C. Smith on the Berkeley-Oakland side of San Francisco and details
on page 217 some of his early fannish involvement
In 1928 Aubrey MacDermott, Clifton Amsbury, Lester
Anderson, and Louis C. Smith on the Berkeley-Oakland side of San
Francisco Bay began meeting monthly as the Eastbay Science
Correspondence Club (ESCC). Raymond Palmer, originally a
Chicago SCC member, suggested a national merger [with his own
organisation and they became the] Eastbay Scientific Association,
merged into one club under a constitution drafted by Dennis,
Clements, and A. B. Maloire of Chehalis, Washington.
277
Critic fanzine was edited by Claire P. Beck, and that particular edition was
the first issued from her new address at Lakeport, California.
Smith had a column titled Fantastica in the fanzine Helios (Oct-Nov-Dec
1937).
According to the online The FictionMags Index Smith had letters in Weird
Tales: Feb, Dec 1933, Dec 1934, Aug 1935, Nov 1936.
Smith had a column published in the Tesseract fanzine: December 1936;
and January 1937 (titled Authorsophy, stated as being a column by
Louis C. Smith which quotes Edmond Hamilton, E. E. Smith and others);
and March 1937; and October 1937 (titled Science in Fiction). Tesseract
was apparently the product of The Science Fiction Advancement Association
of San Francisco, with which Smith was presumably involved since he was
evidently living in the city. In 1941 Smith was noted in a SF fanzine as
living in San Francisco
recent news from America is that that eternal infernal
bibliography-in-preparation bug has now bitten old-time fan Louis
C. Smith and Fantasia-editor Louis Goldstone, both of San
Francisco. (Futurian War Digest, 1941, No.14).
This quip probably refers to his venture with co-editor Jack Riggs, on a 28
page index of SF pulp stories: Unknown Index: Fantasy Fiction in Three
Sections, Table of Contents, Index of Titles, Alphabetical List of Authors,
Berkeley, Calif., 1944 or 1946. A book record at Worldcat describes this
work as an Index to the 39 issues of Unknown and Unknown Worlds.
The cover of this work actually gives us an address:
1620 Chestnut Street, Berkley-2- California
279
However, this may have been Jack Riggs rather than Smiths address, since
the 1941 Fanzine Yearbook in section two of Le Zombie (January, 1942)
gives the title and address of Smiths own fanzine:
TELLUS
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. gives the list in full in the Lovecraft Annual 2012.
282
discussions. The meaning of this word pink seems uncertain. Barlow was
gay and Derleth (so Im told) was bisexual, and the book Selected Papers on
Lovecraft tantalisingly noted in passing4 the the incredibly erroneous views
on sex of Woodburn Harris. This small constellation of hints might lead
some to consider that pink could be a code for gay.
But pink was far more likely to imply the Lovecraft - Harris
correspondence was politically communist in tone. I have found one
contemporary reference online, with a similar usage I was a member of
this parlor pink discussion group back in 1942, referring to membership of a
group with... communistic overtones.5 I also found a mention of
detecting well-organized pink discussion groups in the context of anticommunism.6 So it would be tempting to presume that Barlows meaning of
pink was the same as pinko: a once-common term in the 1940s and 50s,
meaning someone who was a communist sympathiser or a fellow traveler
with socialism. The Oxford English Dictionary dates pinko to as early as
1936, and Barlows notes on Lovecrafts address list were written after that
date.
This seems the most plausible explanation, yet it is one which appears to be
directly contradicted by Lovecraft himself
As for our young communist [Weiss] I have just set Farmer
Woodburn Harris of Vermont on to him, and expect some brilliant
fireworks. Harris is a political conservative of the traditional Yankee
mould, and his keen wit and horse-sense will form a delightful foil to
young Weisss bolshevism7
Harris had been an Acting Sergeant Major in the First World War, was
the son of a minister and had been a school principal, then became a farmer
S.T. Joshi (Ed.), Selected Papers on Lovecraft, Necronomicon Press, 1989, p.69.
after being deafened in the First World War.8 By 1930 Harris was a reader
of Joseph McCabes (apparently sober and balanced) pamphlets concerning
the facts of the historical reality of Jesus.9 His conservative background, and
the Lovecraft comment above, suggests that Harris was certainly not at that
time a communist red or even a pink sympathiser.
Possibly the solution to the riddle is that Barlow knew of Weisss
correspondence with Harris, thus of the pink nature of the letters that
Harris might have in his possession? But against Weisss name on the list
Barlow notes that Weiss was an outright Red. So why might he use Pink
elsewhere on the list, when Red would have served if he was referring to
Weisss correspondence with Harris?
The solution would appear to be that perhaps Barlow himself (apparently a
communist sympathiser at one time) might have had some correspondence
with Harris on politics? Or that he knew of an abrupt political conversion on
the part of Harris? The latter is not as unlikely as it would seem from
reading the published scholarship. I have been kindly informed by Randy
Everts that he interviewed Woodburn Harris at his home in 1968, and that
at that time
he was in fact a communist, with his bedroom bookcase filled
with communist literature which he proudly displayed to me. He
told me that he was in despair and near suicide after being deafened
in WWI [the First World War] (his double hearing aids restored
some of his hearing when I interviewed him) and a letter from
Lovecraft (Harris was friends with Lovecrafts Vermont friends who
might have been the intermediaries) he told me saved his life. He
was a thoroughly fascinating person on par with the more creative Ira
A. Cole, and swam every day in the river behind his home (he
8 Randy Everts interviewed Harris. I thank Everts for his kindly supplying me with the
additional information of the deafness of Harris.
9 Harris defended McCabe from shoddy criticism in a letter to the editor in The Outlook, July 9,
1930, p.398.
284
10
Interesting Items, sized approx 7.4 x 4.4 and well printed. He discovered
amateurdom in 19121 was one of the longest running amateur publications,
and the oldest of the British amateur publications.
Kenneth W. Faig Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft Annual, No.6, 2012, p.167.
286
Brown University Library, Annual Report of the University Librarian, 1995, p.20.
287
5 Kenneth W. Fiag kindly informs me these copies were purchased by Juha-Matti Rajala of
Finland.
288
S.T. Joshi notes in An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia that the original title for
Interesting Items was Llandudnos Weekly. It would be eight years after 1904
before Harris would encounter the amateur press.
Kenneth W. Faig notes7 that by the late 1970s or very early 1980s, Harriss
large collection of amateur material had by then passed to a Roy Heaven.
Presumably Harriss comics collection was also recognized as valuable, and
thus saved from any wish for expediency in clearing his house after his death.
In his later life I have found that Harris was a member of the British
Fantasy Society in the 1940s, and is noted in a publication8 as attending at
least one convention.
It appears that by the post-war period Harris was also being noted as a
major collector of early British comics
Arthur Harris of Penrhyn Bay, Llandudno, owner of that unique
collection of nearly 3,000 comics (needless to say the decent British
variety), has recently given three talks concerning them [in
Llandudno in 1952/3].9
His home at Penrhyn Bay was and still is actually quite detached from
Llandudno town, being in the bay on the far side of the huge and rocky
Little Ormes Headland. Before modern development, the place was very
small and remote.
Kenneth W. Faig Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft Annual, No.6, 2012, p.167.
Although in true British fashion, the tiny size of the place didnt stop the
place having a museum devoted to weird and wonderful relics
291
Horatio E. Smith
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 Poes time
During Poes lifetime, one of the most popular English writers of
poetry, essays, novels and tales was Horace or Horatio Smith (17791849).3
The history of the French dept. at Amherst College supplies a useful
academic biography confirming 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 SainteBeuve, 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
[probably 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 Amherst College French dept. history also notes he was named
Chevalier de la Legion dHonneur by the French government.4
Burton R. Pollin, Figs, Bells, Poe, and Horace Smith, Poe Newsletter, June 1970.
4 This appears to have been for his service in the French Branch of the Y or YMCA service,
servicing the entertainment and recreation needs of the American troops in France during the
293
The move to Brown University in 1926 suggests that, if Lovecraft had not
noted Smiths 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 paper in French La fortune dune oeuvre de jeunesse de
Stendhal en Amerique (1927, The American reception of an early work by
Stendhal) in Editions du Stendhal-Club. This was followed by Masters of
French literature (Scribner, 1937).
Amherst Graduates Quarterly reported Horatio E. Smith and Miss
Ernestine Failing were married at Portland, Ore., July 3, 1911.5 The name
of his wife is confirmed by the Smith Alumnae Quarterly magazine of 1934
which notes that Ernestine Failings husband, Horatio E. Smith has
been appointed at Columbia. This leads us to his Providence address: in
1926 the Smith Alumnae Quarterly gave his wifes address as 168 Irving Av.,
Providence, R.I. 6 The Smith Alumni Quarterly of July 1931 states a new
address had become available for Ernestine at 89 University Av.,
Providence, R.I. I suggest that these two pieces of evidence give us a more
precise date for Smith at Brown than the Amherst College biography was
able to supply: it seems Smith was at Brown until around 1934. This is
confirmed by a listing of Professor Horatio E. Smith, Brown University as
Chairman of Modern Languages in the College Entrance Examination Board
report, 1933.
I have not been able to pin him to any home address, but the 1934 Whos
Who In American Education may have details.
By 1942 Smith was noted in online sources as Prof. Horatio E. Smith,
chairman of the Columbia department of Romance languages, and he was
on the Modern Language Associations Commission on Trends in
First World War. In this effort, directing the work in about 1500 huts, were: Professor Horatio
E. Smith... from George H. Nettleton, Yale in the World War, p.422.
5
The couple had a daughter, Mary, who went into business in New York in 1936.
She is still listed at this address in the 1932 edition of the Annual Register of the Alumnae
Association of Smith College, suggesting she did not inform Smith of her change of address in 1929.
6
294
295
GARDENS OF DELIGHT?
THOMAS STUART EVANS (1885-1940)
Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., Lovecrafts 1937 Diary, Lovecraft Annual 2012. p.162.
2 Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., on reading a draft of this note, kindly suggested the possibility that
Annie (Phillips) Gamwell (1866-1941), the aunt closest in age to Anna L. Evans, might have once
been at school with Evans at Miss Wheelers School in Providence.
296
Faig Jr. In these Lovecraft does sound a little tepid about Evans, calling him
aimiable but not excessively profund3 as if he were someone that his aunts
had thrown him together with. Lovecrafts letter does tell us that Evans had
playwriting predilections, but I can find no online trace of him as a
playwright or anything else.4 Likewise, the area of 145 Medway has seen
much redevelopment and the fabric of it has vanished. A Google Street
View (based on a more accurate Bing Maps pinpointing of the address)
suggests that the site of the house and garden is now a car park. There are
still imposing houses a little further up the road though, which indicate what
the Evans house would once have looked like.
Ibid, p.157.
Ibid, p.157.
297
298
resting place, and the site of his car ownership point to Georgetown in
Connecticut as his home location at that time. Further evidence I have
found suggests he did indeed work in New York, on the famous Fifth
Avenue, where he was a senior buyer in the ladies hat trade. He is recorded
on a passenger manifest as leaving New York on the transatlantic ship
Caledonia, bound for Glasgow in Scotland, on 14th June 1913, presumably
on a buying trip to the Scottish tweed cloth market.
The main evidence for his involvement at a senior level in the millinery
trade arises from his return from a trip to Paris in summer 1917. There is a
52 year old Dudley C. Newton, listed on the passenger manifest as
disembarking at Ellis Island in New York on the transatlantic ship Chicago,
from Bordeaux in France, on 19th July 1917. His age on the ships passenger
list is right, if he was the Dudley Charles Newton born 1864. One has to
assume that he was returning from Europe because of the American entry
into the First World War on 6th April 1917. This appears to have been so,
since Millinery Trade Review,2 a New York trade journal noted this of him
Paris Takes Note of Arrivals: A copy of the Paris edition of The
New York Herald of July 1st, brought back by Dudley C. Newton,
contains the following: The Autumn millinery season for foreign
buyers is due to open this week, but the
My supposition from this was that he had been in Paris. This was then
confirmed elsewhere in the same issue of Millinery Trade Review. I found
there a short article on Newtons experiences
Nevertheless [despite the war], men and women buyers from the
large department and wholesale millinery stores have braved these
2 Millinery Trade Review, volume 42, 1917, p.106. One wonders if this journal might be perused
for details of Lovecrafts wife Sonia and her business ventures in the hat trade? Theres a full
1914-1922 run of Millinery Trade Review on Hathi at catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008603921 if
anyone wants to search it for details of Sonias dept. store or perhaps her early involvement in the
hat trade. It may also have more details of Newtons pre-1922 business activities. Some of the
issues are still being indexed by Hathi and at May 2013 dont yet have keyword search available.
Presumably there would be notices of her independent hat shops, in later issues of Millinery Trade
Review, but these are not online due to copyright.
299
3 Kenneth W. Faig Jr. kindly informs me that there are two surviving letters from Newton to
Lovecraft, at Brown University. I do not know the contents of these. I have also discovered that
Kenneth W. Faig Jr. has a short essay on Newton, Lovecrafts Unknown Friend: Dudley Charles
Newton, in his book The Unknown Lovecraft, Hippocampus Press, 2009, but have as yet been
unable to see this essay.
300
Scully Bros. later moved to larger premises at 32 West 47th Street around
1920 or 1921.4 They are recorded as having patented a number of N.Y.
Ladies trimmed hats in 1922. In the Second World War they appear to
have been relocated or to have started a branch on the West Coast, where
they made large numbers of airmens leather flying helmets. They are also
recorded in the online record as making winter shoulder capes for women
which included all-wool tartan plaid linings, perhaps suggesting why
Newton would have embarked on his ship to Scotland rather than London in
summer 1913, since he could then have more easily visited the weavers of the
Scottish tartan industry.
Interestingly the location of Hartford, in Connecticut, was where Lovecraft
met Sonia for the last time in March 1933. Why was she staying in or near
Hartford, and not a more central hotel in New York or Brooklyn? One
wonders if Sonia was perhaps staying with Newton on her return from
Europe? Since Newton would have been living 25 miles away from
Hartford, if he was then still at his 1915 location of Georgetown in
Connecticut. Perhaps as he aged and moved into semi-retirement he divided
his time between Connecticut near New York and St. Augustine in Florida?5
I also wonder if he may be the same Dudley C. Newton who in his old age
wrote credited crosswords for newspapers? This is one from the Montreal
Gazette in the early 1940s
5 Randy Everts notes in a comment on my blog that he once had a letter from the St.
Augustine librarian who wrote me in response to my long ago inquiry to the library about HPL
correspondent Dudley C. Newton.. Kenneth W. Faig Jr. states of this letter that the Librarian
there recalled him [Newton] as a frequent library patron.
301
302
Lovecraft:
Walking with Cthulhu : H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26.
Ice Cores : essays on Lovecrafts novella At the Mountains of Madness.
Lovecraft in Historical Context : A Third Collection of Essays and Notes.
Lovecraft in Historical Context : Further Essays and Notes.
Lovecraft in Historical Context : Essays.
Good Old Mac: Henry Everett McNeil, 1862-1929. A collection and biographical essay.
Posthumous collaborations:
The Time Machine : A Sequel.
Crusoe : the Macabre Later Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
Tales of Lovecraftian Cats.
Original novel:
The Spyders of Burslem.
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304