HP Lovecraft

‘The Horror at Clinton Street’ feature contains three photographs of Lovecraft’s address. “169 Clinton Street in 1925” [FT396:36 ]and “The same address… as it looks today” [FT396:39] – are indubitably the same building; but in the third picture (p39) – “Lovecraft outside 169 Clinton Street in 1925/6” – the building in the background, although superficially similar, is clearly different. In fact, Google Streetview shows it is the building on the opposite corner of the intersection to 169, apparently 184 Clinton Street. So the caption is technically correct: Lovecraft is ‘outside’ 169, but facing towards it – the building behind him is not 169.

Roger J Morgan By email

Lovecraft’s xenophobia in Brooklyn uncannily echoes the Third Satire of Juvenal, in which an embittered native Italian, Umbricius, inveighs against immigration:

I cannot bear a Rome of Greeks, Quirites:

And yet, what portion of our scum are Greeks ?

Syrian Orontes has long flushed

Its load into the Tiber... (lines 60-62)

Richard George

St Albans, Hertfordshire

Re: the Lovecraft feature [FT396:36-41], I was reminded of the following letter I came across in an old issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories (Feb 1948):

“Dear Sir: In the October issue of ‘Thrilling Wonder Stories’ I was intrigued by a letter from B. De Revere, in which he (or she?) mentioned liking H.P. Lovecraft’s horror tales. As my husband and I knew H.P.L. personally, (he lived in Providence all his life) I want publically [to] thank B. De Revere for all the nice things said re: Lovecraft.

“If you, dear editor, had known the man as we did… of his passionate love for cats, his dislike of all fish, and his hatred of daylight, you perhaps would realize that anything he wrote in the ‘weird’ or fantastic line, he really ‘lived’… and I use the word ‘live’ advisedly… even when he lay dying in the hospital, he asked the nurse for a pencil and paper and vividly recorded (for the doctor’s benefit) exactly how he felt while dying.

“Lovecraft was a tall, spare man. His skin was the colour of tallow. His handclasp was firm but his hands were always ice-cold. He despised sunshine, and adored utter darkness. He wrote his best horror tales after midnight. His favourite food was sweet chocolate… he consumed pounds of it, and cheese and fruit. He loved coffee smothered with sugar… as strong as love and as black as sin!

“Lovecraft’s marriage was short-lived and his divorce was conducted quietly and without press notices. We sympathized with him in his every mood, because we knew him intimately and well – we often visit his unmarked grave in beautiful Swan Point cemetery in Providence, where a huge shaft in the center of the burial plot proclaims that his parents sleep there. His grave was somewhat sunken, last time we visited it, and covered with creeping green myrtle vines. His very spirit seemed hovering over his grave as we stood there in silent prayer for a man whose genius shall ever live, after his bones have crumbled into dust.

“During his lifetime, we used to tell him that his stories rivalled those of Edgar Allan Poe. He ‘pooh-poohed’ the very notion! He considered his work nothing at all, and never displayed any vanity. He simply wrote because he HAD to write… from an inner urge that would not let him sleep. May he rest in peace! –– Mrs. Muriel E. Eddy, 125 Pearl Street, Providence, Rhode Island.”

Rian Hughes

By email