An Account in Verse of the Marvellous Adventures of H. Lovecraft, Esq.

An Account in Verse of the Marvellous Adventures of H. Lovecraft, Esq. Whilst Travelling on the W. & B. Branch N.Y. N.H. & H. R.R. in Jany. 1901 in one of those most modern devices, To wit: An Electric Train.

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Friday ‘picture postals’ from Lovecraft: Sheepshead Bay, NYC

The dyke and spillway at Sheepshead Bay, New York City. Presumably the open sea is on one side, hence the spray of the waves hitting the breakwater, and a low semi-tidal salt-marsh bay is on the other side.

This appears to be the southernmost extremity of a watery landscape that H. P. Lovecraft discovered rather early in his encounter with New York City, because Dench had his home there…

Dench’s [home on Emmons Ave. was a regular amateur press meeting-place, and was located] by the old, curious wharves of Sheepshead Bay [near the old Dutch marsh country, that being] “the vast, low-lying flat lands and salt marshes of Southern Brooklyn; where old Dutch cottages reared their curved gables, and old Dutch winds stirred the sedges along sluggish inlets brooding gray and shadowy and out of reach of the long red rays of hazy setting suns.

Emmons Ave., Sheepshead Bay, in 1931, showing how it fronted the wharves and jetties. John Milton Heins’s “Face to Face with Amateur Journalists” (1920 reprinted in The Fossil #333 from The American Amateur) reveals a few more details of the Dench house, confirming that it was directly on the shoreline… “Sheepshead Bay in a bungalow, on the water front”. In Lovecraft’s time this waterfront was a busy working place, and in the season boats were eagerly hired by sports fishermen and hunters. The following two maps show the Sheepshead Bay shoreline frontage in broad relation to Fulton St. and Prospect Park, and the flatlands to the north. The detailed topographical maps shows the exact location of the Sheepshead Bay shoreline frontage on which Dench’s house was located, and the proxity to the named “Flatlands” settlement and its wide marshland surroundings. One can see why the area provided New York City with such excellent fishing and duck-hunting.

Almost the entire Long Island shoreline was once salt-marsh flatland and swamps. By Lovecraft’s time most of this was long gone, but the New York City Guide of 1939 reported a settlement called the ‘Flatlands’ remained and that… “Much of the southern section [of this] is unreclaimed marshland” with a population of rough squatters and fishermen. Lovecraft’s “vast, low-lying flat lands and salt marshes” of the 1920s thus appear to have run south of the settlement of Flatlands toward Sheepshead Bay, with “Bergen Beach” being mentioned by the Guide as an especially bleak place: “At Bergen Beach, the brooding silence of the dour marshland hangs over old houses and shanties”.

This watery landscape had originally drawn Dutch settlers because it reminded them of the very similar fenland country in Holland, and they knew how to work it and what could be got from it. By Lovecraft’s time it seems that the Dutch had mostly moved on and up in New York society, but their relics remained and continued to fascinate him. For instance Lovecraft’s self-parodying story “The Hound” arose in September 1922 after… “I had been exploring an old Dutch cemetery in Flatbush, where the ancient gravestones are in the Dutch language”. He had chipped a small piece off a Dutch gravestone…

I must place it beneath my pillow as I sleep… who can say what thing might not come out of the centuried earth to exact vengeance for his desecrated tomb? And should it come, who can say what it might not resemble?

It is likely that Lovecraft first knew the marshland area through walks there in the company of his fellow writer Everett McNeil. Seemingly in Autumn 1922, when they likely used Dench’s nearby house in Sheepshead Bay as a base. Possibly this large marshland area was not fully explored by Lovecraft in 1922. Nor during his later New York residency, unless perhaps you count as evidence the briefest vision of a pre-New York landscape in the story “He”… “in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh constellated with nervous fireflies.”

But the area and its Dutch heritage certainly fascinated Lovecraft. He continued to visits Flatbush for walks (for instance in August 1925), and drew heavily on his historical knowledge of the New York Dutch in “The Horror at Red Hook”. In 1928, when he briefly returned to New York, he spent much time intensively researching the Flatbush area, to seek out the most ‘antient’ buildings in the flatlands and other rare survivals from colonial times that might still lurk there. This project included venturing out (seemingly for the first time?) to the old tidal-mill called Gerritsen Mill…

Being oblig’d by circumstances to spend above a month and a half, last spring [Spring 1928], in the town of Flatbush, near New-York, in the province of that name, I resolv’d to make my sojourn pleasant by means of such observations of good scenery and historick monuments as the nature of the region permitted. […] My stay in Flatbush was chiefly notable for my discovery, thro’ diligent searching of many books, of several objects of much antiquity which I had never discover’d before. The western end of Long-Island, in which the village [of Flatbush] is situate, was settled by Hollanders at a very early date; and so widely scatter’d were their architectural constructions, that a surprising number have surviv’d to the present time amidst surroundings more and more incongruous. […]

But most of my late explorations dealt with those parts of the country south of the village; once very open and sparsely settled, but now fast spoilt by cheap streets and the cottages of an hybrid foreign rabble. On the 19th of May I made a trip to that part of Jamaica Bay call’d the Mill Basin, there seeing for the first time the Jan Schenck house, built in 1656 from the timbers of a privateer [ship], and reputed to be the oldest house in the entire province of New-York. This house, an old Dutch cottage with steep peaked roof, is situate on a flat tidal marsh near the shoar […]

On still another occasion I visited the old Gerritsen Tide Mill on a creek south of Flatbush. This was built in 1688, and a dam made at the same time still confines the rising waters of the sea. The wheel is in a good state, though the building itself hath suffer’d considerably since its abandonment near forty years ago. […]

Further explorations in Flatbush, Flatlands, New Utrecht, and related regions yielded many highly picturesque glimpses of old farmhouses, churches, churchyards, and other reliques of better days.

The Mill in 1922, as Lovecraft would have known it.

The newspaper cutting above is from 1934, after Lovecraft’s time as a resident in New York. A grand 1930s mega-scheme was afoot and intended to drain the marshes for a vast new leisure-park. The Gerritsen Mill might have been part of that, but it was conveniently burned down shortly after its restoration was announced. The scheme never happened, and New York got a wildlife preserve instead.

Lovecraft does not mention a boat, which at that point he presumably could not afford to hire, and which one would assume (from looking at the maps) would have been necessary to fully explore the area and reach the remotest homesteads. He was likely restricted to roads, tracks and trolley-buses.

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Did the area have an influence on Lovecraft’s fiction? It seems doubtful, and even if it did then the influence is certainly not now provable.

i) One might wonder if perhaps the marshes vaguely contributed something to the general atmosphere of “Innsmouth” (written some three years later). But Lovecraft had known marshland (Cat Swamp) and wild creeks (the York Pond ravine) intimately in middle-childhood, and a number of swamps and marshes had been investigated during his adult travels and visits. Marshes at places such as Ipswich, Mass. may have more of a claim to have inspired those of “Innsmouth” — there is for instance an early 1917 Lovecraft poem “On Receiving a Picture of the Marshes at Ipswich” and Ipswich is very frequently mentioned in “Innsmouth”, albeit never in direct connection with marshes. Lovecraft instead re-positions his marshes to surround Innsmouth itself, and his… “wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.” Although the narrator’s later wide views of the Innsmouth terrain do seem to hint that this marshland stretches away very extensively, perhaps even reaching nearly to the nearby Ipswich. That said, there are many salt-marshes on that 20-mile stretch of coast and they appear to occur all the way from Newburyport down to Gloucester. While these might have been picturesque in their own way, especially when surveyed from a hill or train, they appear to have been purely rural and thus lacked the enticingly ‘antient’ architectural elements that Lovecraft sought in Flatbush and the Brooklyn flatlands…

ii) There is a familial name-link with the Gerritsen Mill in the Brooklyn flatlands, as readers will remember that in Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook” the hero-villain Suydam marries a Cornelia Gerritsen. But the Gerritsen name had by then spread far and wide in New York.

iii) Some might even wonder about the impact of Lovecraft very probably getting inside a number of ancient primitively-built Dutch barns, in his intensive 1928 exploration of rural Flatbush — and how that might have influenced his central use of the barn in “The Dunwich Horror” (written some months later in August 1928)…

One also recalls that it is from the Wilbraham “marshland” that the memorable whippoorwills of that story came…

there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.

iv) Interestingly, there was also local Sheepshead lore of a sea-monster. This was deemed to lurk a little way off the shoreline, but was surprisingly little-seen. This may, for some, recall the general idea of “The Horror at Martin’s Beach”. In the postcard seen below their local monster appears in a humourous photomontage of the time…

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For those wondering about the Sheepshead placename, apparently it has nothing to do tasty mutton dinners — “Sheepshead” is simply the name of an abundant type of local edible fish, which gave its name to an early hotel, and thus the area was named.

A memoir of child-life out on the salt-flats, Thomas J. Campanella’s “The Lost Creek”, evocatively recalled this landscape as…

An incursion of nature into the cast grid of the city, Gerritsen is a relic landscape, a counterpoint to the artificiality of its surroundings. The rolling hummocks wear a soft, wind-tossed mane of reeds, and here and there thickets of aspen, sumac and bayberry punctuate the scene. Ring-necked pheasants, descendants from flocks released for a hunting estate in the nineteenth century, dart between clumps of phragmites [very tall densely-packed water-reeds]. Far off to the northwest the peaks of Manhattan are surreal, the tilted bedrock of an alien world. The steady hum of motors on the Belt Parkway recedes. The deep tide of time casts its spell.

As for Lovecraft, a 1931 letter to Morton (Selected Letters III) sees Lovecraft riffing through several pages of Kerouac-like ‘stream-of-consciousness’ word-associations, due to having eaten a tasty dish of roast lamb. His intent here is to convey to Morton the richness than can be obtained by simply musing on what one already knows, rather than using a mealtime to peruse a mundane newspaper in search of new ‘facts’. Lovecraft’s plate of roast lamb yields, among other fleeting cerebral associations…

Sheepshead Bay …… Emmons Ave. [Dench lived at 3052 Emmons Ave., Sheepshead Bay] …… stink of fish ….. Gerritsen Tide-mill 1688 … Avenue V . …… Neck Road .. ….. Stillwell House . . … Milestone. .. 8 miles to Brockland Ferry … flat marshlands, creeks, waving sedge, flutter of marsh birds .. .. .. curved cottage roofs … . east winds sighing of Old Holland .. … mutton-chop whiskers …. Victorian aera

“8 miles to Brockland Ferry” indicates the lore-haunted inscription on the old milestone in front of the Voorhees homestead in Sheepshead Bay, on the corner of Neck Road and Ryder’s Lane. Thus we can be fairly sure the Voorhees house was encountered on Lovecraft’s Flatbush itinerary, along with many others. Many of these old houses were photographed in ways that do not suggest their landscape/shoreline context, but the Schenck House is an evocative exception…

Lovecraft’s recall of “mutton-chop whiskers …. Victorian aera” also suggests he may have met old Dutch men on his walks, men who still held to their homesteads and to the old Dutch manner of appearance and dress — albeit probably having abandoned their clog-wearing by that time…

Elsewhere the letters to Morton also give a strong indication that it was Everett McNeil who made Lovecraft aware of this unusual local waterscape, mostly likely in the early 1920s when Lovecraft was visiting rather than living in New York. He writes of McNeil in 1929, on learning of the old man’s death, and strongly links McNeil with the landscape by recalling the early 1920s and…

the vast, level reaches of the old Dutch marsh country around Sheepshead Bay, brooding with elder mystery in the autumn gloaming, and with the winds of old Holland’s canals blowing the sedges that waved and beckoned along strange, salty inlets. […] Through those fantastic streets, along those fantastic terraces [of New York City], and over those fantastic salt marshes with the waving sedges and sparse Dutch gables, the quaint, likeable little figure may continue to plod… phantom among phantoms…

The mention of “autumn” here might place the first walks into the marshlands, with McNeil, quite near in time to Lovecraft’s September 1922 exploration of the Flatbush churchyard that led to “The Hound”.

Lovecraft and McNeil would surely be pleased to know that the U.S. Army is currently putting the finishing touches to a decades-long restoration of 180+ acres of the old salt-marshes, meaning that a substantial part of the once “vast” flatlands have survived in a form that the two men would recognise.

Coffee Canon

This week the Coffee Canon coffee history podcast visits The Double R Coffee House in New York City, a New York hangout for H.P. Lovecraft and the Kalem Club.

A promotional card for the new branch at Lexington Av., which wasn’t Lovecraft’s preferred branch at 112 West Forty-fourth Street.

I had another look for information about Lovecraft’s branch. The Soda Fountain trade journal for 1921 ran a profile when it moved from 108 West Forty-fourth Street to 112. I can’t get more than a snippet or two of that, but the article noted…

It is directly across the street from Belasco’s theater, at 112 West Forty-fourth street.

That it was opposite a theatre is new to me, and would help to further explain the ‘theatrical’ aspect to its clientele — further confirming the information in the letter from Kirk. Another snippet of the same trade-journal article notes that board games such as dominoes, checkers and chess were available to drinkers. Pure “Sugar Cane Juice”, apparently a Brazilian drink, was available — which might have suited Lovecraft’s sweet tooth.

Deathbed conversions

A further 1937 edition of the Amateur Correspondent has appeared on Archive.org. I had previously noted two others from 1937. This was, of course, the period of time in which news of Lovecraft’s death was slowly percolating through a fandom that was still decades away from being connected at hyper-speed by digital technologies. Amateur Correspondent, September-October 1937 has a page by R.W Sherman. He talks of the commentators who had formerly derided and shunned Lovecraft while alive — and yet on the master’s death seemed to have suddenly converted themselves into admirers.

The Perennial Apocalypse: How the End of the World Shapes History

Those interested in the sweeping intellectual and emotional influence of Spengler on the 1920s and 30s might be interested in a new long review of the out-of-print book The Perennial Apocalypse: How the End of the World Shapes History (1998). Spengler’s ideas and their popular interpretations touched enduring writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and R.E. Howard. In science-fiction, Asimov’s ideas about psychohistory also spring to mind. Thus this new review seems relevant to mention here. The review states that the book looked at…

Spengler alongside a long tradition of historical models that all pointed towards an “end of history.” These summaries of historical narrative modes are the best parts of the book. The project of The Perennial Apocalypse is more ambitious than to provide summaries, though. […] The central argument of The Perennial Apocalypse is that prevailing historical models of how history should go, must inevitably go, play their part in shaping events. But history almost never proceeds in the predicted fashion as a result.

A fascinating idea, re: how intellectual doom-mongering and an associated wrong-headed consensus among the gullible classes and journalists, might act as bumpers on the fast-moving pinball-table of emerging historical events. It’s something I discuss from time to time, over on my 2020 blog, and there are other books on it such as Herman’s The Idea of Decline in Western History.

Yet, while the reviewer finds in the book an interesting and well-written discussion of the structural commonalities of such predictions, he also finds few examples of their strong influence on the flow of history…

Reilly never managed to give many thorough examples of this kind of process at work. The Perennial Apocalypse ends up dwelling far more on the stuff of the great totalizing narratives of history than how they manifest in intellectual spheres and end up steering society.

Too many variables in the mix, perhaps, which in a way is kind of encouraging. Since it might lead to the supposition that no matter how much the cultural elites try to ‘put bumpers on the pinball table of history’ or tilt the table to ‘correct’ it by pounding on it with their fist, they can’t ultimately beat the inbuilt structural elements of the table. Elements which inexorably channel the probabilities of the ball’s direction across an implacable and unreachable table-base. The pinball always ends up in the hole at the bottom of the table.

The book is said to be discursive and goes beyond its main thesis, to detour into…

obscure 19th century millenarian scientific romances, H.P. Lovecraft, theosophy, Christian eschatology, and the evils of the worlds envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke.

It sounds fascinating. The original promotional blurb ran…

In every culture, history is a story, and the end of that story is the end of the world. This work describes the surprising similarities among the various forms that the ‘end of history’ has taken around the world and throughout time. Further, it explores how the image of the end has affected actual historical events, from the rise of millenarian cults to the evolution of the idea of progress.

Regrettably the book now appears to be totally unavailable, unless one pops up on eBay or Abe. There’s not even an Amazon listing for it on either Amazon UK or USA. Although the table of contents is still available along with a free bit of Chapter 2. A good example, I’d suggest, of how certain early self-published POD books are likely to become the real collectable ultra-rarities for the mid 21st century book collector.

Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography

One book I seem to have unintentionally overlooked, in my blog’s rolling survey of such in Sept/Oct of last year, is Robert E. Howard: A Literary Biography (Oct 2018). The new book is intended as a reliable and well-written introductory biography for those new to Howard and his work, and who are not historians. It weighs in at 250 pages as a trade paperback or budget Kindle ebook. There’s a foreword by Rusty Burke, who praises the author and notes that the text was peer reviewed by Howard scholars. Howard’s fiction is stepped through in chronological sequence, with judicious plot summaries. Lovecraft and the backroom editorial matters at Weird Tales are covered adequately. The ‘deep background’ on Howard’s family history and early childhood is briefly surveyed in only a few pages, as this material can now be found elsewhere in good form.

Friday “picture postals” from Lovecraft: the Rhode Island letter-carrier (postman)

The typical letter-carrier (in British parlance, ‘the postman’, in American ‘the mail-man’) of the 1900s, delivering the mail to houses.

One almost wonders if, at times, Lovecraft even had his own personal letter-carrier to haul up the hill his daily load of correspondence, subscription magazines and amateur journals, and occasional books. No doubt his aunts also had their share of correspondence and packages.

The Arabian Nights

The Librivox readers are working through Richard Burton’s The Book of A Thousand Nights and a Night, aka ‘The Arabian Nights’, as audiobook readings and have just released volume 9. Which makes it almost complete, as Volume 10’s contents page lists one final story, then the infamous Terminal Essay, appendices and index. Presumably once Vol. 10 is done the team will then go on to do the six volume Supplemental Nights and other related material from Burton.

The free Librivox audio is per-story, but the raw title usually gives one no indication of the contents. For instance, “Forty-second Night”. One needs to look up the story title at The Thousand Nights and a Night at wollamshram.ca. There, for instance, one can see that the story for Night 908 would be “The Spider and the Wind”, and the other titles at wollamshram.ca are similarly descriptive.

The Arabian Nights was of course a formative influence on the boy Lovecraft. However the Burton edition was unlikely to have been the edition Lovecraft knew, though it is possible that the first nine volumes of the edition were available to his elders in Providence, and that he may have peeked into ‘forbidden’ copies of Burton later in the bookshops and libraries of New York City. S.T. Joshi comments on the matter in I Am Providence…

The copy found in his library [Andrew Lang 1898 … could not have been read] at the age of five. … Sir Richard Burton’s landmark translation in sixteen volumes in 1885–86. Lovecraft certainly did not read this translation, either, as it is entirely unexpurgated and reveals, as few previous translations did, just how bawdy the Arabian Nights actually are. … My guess is that Lovecraft read one of the following three translations:

The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments: Six Stories. Edited by Samuel Eliot; translated by Jonathan Scott. Authorized for use in the Boston Public Schools. Boston: Lee & Shepard; New York: C. T. Dillington, 1880.

The Thousand and One Nights; or, The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Chicago & New York: Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1885.

The Arabian Nights. Edited by Everett H. Hale; [translated by Edward William Lane]. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1888.

I also spotted The thousand and one nights, or, The Arabian nights entertainments: translated and arranged for family readings, with explanatory notes on Hathi, in its 2nd edition, 1847. “Illustrated with six hundred woodcuts by Harvey and illuminated titles by Owen Jones.” That sounds like the sort of thing that might have been in a Providence drawing room circa 1895, and accessible to young children. One wonders if this might have been the book of the same title that Joshi refers to as being “Bedford, Clarke & Co., 1885”, with Bedford being a later reprinting?

Conan and the Little People

“Conan and the Little People: Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s Theory”, another fascinating new ‘correlate all the contents’ essay by Bobby Derie.

Cthulhu in the Library?

From William Gerold’s b&w photobook College Hill; a photographic study of Brown University in its two hundredth year (1965). Gerold seems unaware of Lovecraft — and anyway couldn’t have photographed 66 College St. circa 1960-65, H.P. Lovecraft’s old house, as it had been moved from the site in 1959. Though he photographed some of the architectural details and sculpted animals and suchlike, and along the way managed to record this Cthulhu-idol like detail from the John Carter Brown Library (1904) at Brown University.

“My aunt is well acquainted with Mr. Champlin Burrage, an Oxford man, who is librarian of the John Carter Brown library at Brown. (I hope to meet him very soon.)” — letter from Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, April 1917.

Circa 1910 postcards of the Library frontage…

Friday ‘Picture Postals’ from Lovecraft: Rhode Island School of Design

The exterior of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, in 1908. Opened on the site in 1893, and known as the Waterman Building, at 11 Waterman St.

When Lovecraft was a young boy, at his own fervent request his parents…

took him in 1897 to see a recently opened exhibit of Greek antiquities at the Rhode Island School of Design

The “entire first floor” was initially dedicated to the public exhibitions, in addition to the adjacent colonial-life Museum house (‘entrance through Waterman St.’) seen on the above map. But in 1897 the construction of the Metcalf exhibition galleries behind the Waterman building was completed. When these new galleries opened, the inaugural show is reported to have been an extravaganza of American and European paintings. But there was also a dedicated Greek and Roman Sculpture gallery with originals, casts and photographs. The opening of the latter gallery was accompanied by… “a course of seven lectures on the History of Greek Art before the students of the Rhode Island School of Design in the Winter of 1897-98” given by the President of Brown University. This Sculpture gallery was presumably what Lovecraft ‘the little Ancient’ saw when it first opened. Possibly it was the same as the sculpture court, seen here, that flanked the entrance to the School’s galleries…

The boy Lovecraft became a “constant” visitor…

before long I was fairly familiar with the principal Grecian myths and had become a constant visitor at the classical art museums of Providence and Boston

Of course in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” young Wilcox is… “studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design”.

A later additional Eliza G. Radeke Building was opened for RISD exhibitions at 224 Benefit Street, dropping down the hill at the back. Lovecraft attended its grand opening in late April 1926. That was about four months before he wrote “The Call of Cthulhu”. The new building included a collection of Greek and Roman art, and a large new collection of Greek coins, although I’m uncertain if this was a relocation and augmentation of the original Waterman St. Sculpture Gallery, or if it had contents that would have been wholly new to both Providence and Lovecraft. One imagines the curious Lovecraft peering into the probably-new coin cases, and spotting remarkably tentacular designs on the ancient coins…

Sargasso #2 and #3

I see that Sargasso #2 and Sargasso #3 have appeared since I noted #1 in summer 2013. Sargasso: journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies, is the quality scholarly journal devoted to Hodgson.

A scholarly article in #2 may be of tangential interest to Lovecraft scholars. A full review of #2 usefully summarises…

Scott Conner’s ‘Dust and Atoms: The Influence of William Hope Hodgson on Clark Ashton Smith’. The long-held belief that ‘The Night Land’ [1912] was a major influence on Smith’s Zothique stories is more or less conclusively disproved by the evidence that he hadn’t read any Hodgson books until two years after the first Zothique tale [1932] was published. On the other hand, Scott Conner provides very convincing evidence that ‘The House on the Borderland’ [1908] was definitely a great influence on the writing of Smith’s story, ‘The Treader in the Dust’ [1935].

Lovecraft himself only made… “the discovery, in the summer of 1934, of the forgotten work of William Hope Hodgson.” (I Am Providence, S.T. Joshi) and felt the work was rather conventional in terms of the philosophy it worked in. Lovecraft considered that…

He is trying to illustrate human nature through symbols & turns of idea which possess significance for those taking a traditional or orthodox view of man’s cosmic bearings. There is no true attempt to express the indefinable feelings experienced by man in confronting the unknown. … To get a full-sized kick from this stuff one must take seriously the orthodox view of cosmic organisation — which is rather impossible today.