A new Lovecraft poem?

I think I may have found another new poem by Lovecraft. Not a macabre one this time, but rather a bit of early juvenilia. It’s the “Fore-worde” to his Hope Street High School yearbook for summer 1907, The Blue & White.

This “Fore-worde” is a poem of suspiciously archaic language, done flawlessly, and also has a characteristic Lovecraft touch in the coining of the neo-archaism “strange-froughte”. Who else but Lovecraft would write such a poem in the style of an 18th century wit, or insert such a phrase?

Neither the title or first line of the poem is in the latest edition of The Ancient Track. Nor is it in the Ancient Track‘s “Chronology”.

If the poem is a very early one by Lovecraft then it’s also interesting for implying that the author was on “ye humbell Boarde of Editours” in early summer 1907, which then leads one to wonder if he influenced the design on the cover. In which the tentacular flame seems to evoke (if you look at it right) a rather Lovecraftian version of a jinn to accompany the surrounding Aladdin’s lamps. If one knows that Lovecraft wore glasses at this time, the central ‘face’ could almost be a self-portrait.

He also appears as “H.P.L.” in the text of a humorous playlet in the Yearbook, titled a “Merry Drama of Hope”. At the plangent end of which he might be trying, in vain, to interest a passing fresher in the concept of meteoritic flight-paths…

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Act IV, Scene 1.

The Corridor after school (snatches of conversation heard.)

[…]

“H. P. L. (Sophomorite:) “Well, the only definite theory advanced as to the cause of the meteoric path being hyperbolic or elliptic, is —”

Giddy Freshite (giggling hysterically:) “— And then he said —”

    (Corridor gradually becomes vacant)

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Lovecraft was a freshman (fresher) at Hope Street High in 1904-05, but left in November 1905 and did not return until September 1906. He formally left on 10th June 1908, without a High School diploma — as he had only taken a few full classes in his final year.

According to a comment by Chris Perridas there may be a photo of Lovecraft in the next yearbook, 1908. But Chris had not been able to see either 1907 or 1908, and they’re still not scanned and online. Possibly it’s a photo that’s already well-known, though there’s nothing from 1908 here.

The small page-scans above are from a long-lost eBay listing, the data for which was snagged and kept online (just about) by a Web traffic-funnelling autobot.

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Lovecraft’s pocket spectroscope

A… “pocket spectroscope, which was the delight of my fellow students at H.S.H.S. [Hope Street High School, Providence]. It is unbelievably tiny — will go into a vest pocket without making much of a bulge — yet gives a neat, bright little spectrum, with clear Frauenhofer lines when directed at sunlight. Many are the times I have passed it around at school.” — Lovecraft, letter to Galpin, 29th August 1918.

He had the device for his astronomy, and it appears that it was specifically used in star-identification. The light of a star would split into a distinctive banding of lines, and thus the identity of an observed star could be confirmed.

Spicy Armadillo Stories

Inspired by the excellence of Sam Moskowitz’s boots-on-the-ground 1964 biographical article on Virgil Finlay, mentioned here in an earlier post, I went looking to see if he had collected more such articles on artists into a book. It seems not, but Archive.org has the 1974 reprint of his earlier Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom (1954).

Also noted, the last issue of Spicy Armadillo Stories #7 (August 1992), themed “How the Pulps Worked”. Includes “Teaching Pulp Magazine Writing” by Sam Moskowitz. Seems to be totally unavailable today, but a $3 Kindle edition might get some interest re: the growing interest in the pulps among business historians.

There’s a more recent collection on how the pulps worked, albeit only from the point of view of the writers and probably mostly talking about story mechanics. The Penny-a-Word Brigade (2017) is from the makers of The Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction (2018, revised edition).

Lovecraft’s Unused Monsters, Cultists and Story-Settings: No.1 – The Pigeon Flyers

It would be interesting to have, at some point, a book titled something like Lovecraft’s Unused Monsters, Cultists and Story-Settings. It would be a sort of expansion of the Commonplace Book, in which the complete letters are scoured for unused monsters, cultists, and glints of story ideas and settings. Doubtless Derleth once trod the same path, and others after him, but it might be nice to see all the possibilities that he mined stripped back to their Lovecraft originals, neatly organised and with the sources given and correlated.

In the meantime, here’s the first in what may be a very occasional series on this blog:

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Lovecraft’s Unused Monsters, Cultists and Story-Settings:

Name: The Pigeon Flyers.
Appearance: Appear to be sinisterly beautiful pigeon-breeding youths.
Status: Messengers who serve “obscene, amorphous serpent-gods” on Thog, dark moon of Yuggoth.
Location: Rooftops of tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City.
Time: Early 1920s.

In the early 1920s H.P. Lovecraft took his first tour of the notorious Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, in the company of its reluctant resident Everett McNeil. Lovecraft was especially struck by the pigeon-flyers of this tough Irish neighbourhood, with their pigeon-lofts perched high on filth-spattered tenement roofs…

… sinister pigeon-breeders on filth-choked roofs sending birds of space out into black unknown gulfs with unrepeatable messages to the obscene, amorphous serpent-gods thereof

The idea was used by Lovecraft, though only in the “The Pigeon Flyers” (Fungi From Yuggoth). Since “The Pigeon Flyers” is an obvious inversion of Genesis 8:11 (“And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth”), one wonders if Lovecraft also knew that Biblical law forbade a class of people called the ‘pigeon flyers’ from giving testimony. Had he once mused on how he might tie this nugget of historical fact about an unspeakable group, with a supernatural slant on the common idea of the birds as being message-carriers?

It might be casually assumed that Lovecraft’s use of “sinister” implies wizened or even wizardly old men. But, in a 1930 letter to Derleth, Lovecraft specified that the ‘pigeon flyers’ of Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1920s were youths and not the tobacco-marinated old men that we today associate with the sport. Lovecraft elsewhere refers to the “cherubic blond youths” of Hell’s Kitchen (Letters from New York, page 30) and their two chief activities of pigeon-breeding and building bonfires. Thus, in a fictional use, their “sinister” aspect would have likely been their preternatural beauty set amid the ammonium stenches and squalor of the pigeon-lofts. That they serve “serpent-gods” would further heighten the intrinsic symbolism.

Some readers might vaguely recall that R.E. Howard once used the pigeon idea in horror. Howard scholars may correct me, but it seems that Howard’s Lovecraft-alike story “Pigeons from Hell” (1934) didn’t arise from his seeing Lovecraft’s poem “The Pigeon Flyers” in late summer 1930 and/or corresponding with Lovecraft on the difficulty of making the intrinsically comical pigeon into a bird of weird horror. Apparently it’s claimed that the Howard story arose instead from memories of “Howard’s grandmother’s ghost stories”, long ago told of old deserted pigeon-roost mansion houses in the American south. Though it’s certain that Howard had earlier expressed admiration for Lovecraft’s use of “the unique grisliness of the notion” of whippoorwill birds in “The Dunwich Horror”.

Lovecraft’s space-pigeons are able to travel through the “black unknown gulfs” to Thog, a dark moon of Yuggoth on the edge of the solar system (“what they brought from Thog beneath their wings” — “The Pigeon Flyers”). This implies that what in earthly terms are thought of as the “serpent-gods” are located on Thog. Or more likely under, in caves and/or under an ice-sea. Presumably “what they brought” to Earth evokes fungi, and the observation arose due to Lovecraft spotting the fungi-like parasitic growths often seen on diseased urban pigeons. The travel is thus two-way, “unrepeatable messages” are sent and then small podules of strange Yuggothian fungi are brought back to Earth. Possibly this fungi has something to do with maintaining the preternatural youth of the Pigeon Flyers.

Lovecraft and ‘heavy metal’

Don Herron today notices that Lovecraft may have been the first to use the term “heavy metal” outside the realm of chemistry. Lovecraft used it to Morton in February 1924, and in the sense of money — heavy coins, jokingly imagining that Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird was paid in physical bags of heavy coin, the ‘heavy metal’. In the early 1920s Lovecraft usually picked up such slang from his boy printer and fellow fairground-carouser “Wisecrack Sandusky” who was an expert at such ‘slick’ talking.

Interestingly, when William S. Burroughs revived “heavy metal” as a counter-culture term in the early 1960s, it was at first also linked with money…

“In the 1962 novel, The Soft Machine, he introduces the character “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid”. His next novel in 1964, Nova Express, develops this theme further […] “With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms — Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes — And the Insect People of Minraud with metal music.”

As well as seemingly originating on a planet with an atmosphere of “vaporized bank notes”, “Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid” is also tangentially connected with cash in terms of his Soft Machine activities. An ex-mobster of the Nova Mob, turned renegade mob-buster, in the novel he devises plans to… “Wise up all the marks everywhere. Show them the rigged wheel”. ‘Marks’ being the American fairground and underworld mob term for a gullible punter who can easily be relived of their cash via a scam. And the “rigged wheel” being the common fairground sideshow wheel, subtly ‘fixed’ so as to cheat the ‘marks’. Burroughs thus seems to have been picking up on a tradition of youthful fairground slang from the pre-war mobster era, of which Lovecraft had probably been aware in the early 1920s. Possibly there was also, in such fairground and arcade environments, the role of the “Heavy Metal Kid” — being the trusted assistant who would cart away the bags of coins from the sideshows, slot machines and pinball tables.

This further suggests that Lovecraft was not only impishly imagining editor Edwin Baird being paid in physical bags of heavy coin, but that he had in mind that the coins were the very ones that had been passed over the counters to pay for Weird Tales.

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: Gorham

Gorham Silversmiths, Providence. Possible employer of H.P. Lovecraft’s father as a salesman or buyer. Although according to S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence, the only evidence we have for that is Sonia’s hazy 1948 memories of what Lovecraft told her in the mid 1920s. On the other hand, the draft of “Innsmouth” might seem to show that Lovecraft had a special niche in his heart for men who were buyers for jewellery firms…

“Before I knew it I found myself telling the fellow that I was a jewellery buyer for a Cleveland firm, and preparing myself to shew a merely professional interest in what I should see.” [in the Marsh Refinery showroom].

Wollheim’s Avon Fantasy Reader

The DMR blog has a new post, “The Sword and Sorcery Legacy of Donald A. Wollheim: Part One”, which seems likely to be followed by more. It points to Wollheim’s editorship of The Avon Fantasy Reader, and thus his role in keeping sword & sorcery and weird fantasy available on the news-stands in a post-war era (1948-52) which increasingly seemed to have lost its taste for such things. Or perhaps Wollheim had cannily spotted that there was still a market demand for such tales, but that the market was no longer being served by other editors and magazines. Weird Tales was still around, just about, but was being run into the ground and would cease in 1954.

If you want to see what the title was like, Archive.org has what seems to be a complete collection of scans of Wollheim’s digest The Avon Fantasy Reader. A sampling of the issues there shows that the Reader wasn’t just sword & sorcery, and Wollheim widened his readership by covering a range of material. He often also slipped in some H.P. Lovecraft reprints, including both “Silver Key” stories and two ghost-written stories (“Yig” and “Eons”).

Anthology Of Empire

New on Archive.org, Anthology Of Empire (1932). The book is a rich and comprehensive historical survey of the literature, with its pages serving as an unwitting swansong for Lovecraft’s beloved British Empire as Imperial responsibilities began to be divested. To a lesser extent the book is also a hymn to dear old Blighty.

Advert from early spring 1932. At 512 pages the above advert states a longer length than the 480-page edition on Archive.org.

The ardent Anglophile H.P Lovecraft must surely have noted the book among the reviews, and almost certainly asked for it at the local library. At this time he was listening regularly to the Empire radio service from Britain, which sent the signal from London toward Canada from 1932 onward. He also had access to the conservative British weekly The Spectator, offering pithy opinion and book reviews, via the Providence Public Library. The Spectator would surely have reviewed Anthology Of Empire in glowing terms.

“Dawn came at North-Scituate, in His Majesty’s Colony of Rhode-Island and Providence-Plantations; and at six-forty-five a.m. I was deposited at the terminal in my native town. God Save the King!” — H.P. Lovecraft to Morton, January 1933, informing Morton his his safe return from New York City by overnight bus.

“To me, Tipperary or Rule Britannia has infinitely more emotional appeal than any creation of Liszt, Beethoven, or Wagner.” — H.P. Lovecraft to Derleth, November 1930.