“Street, The.”
Short story (2,250 words); written in late 1919. First published in the Wolverine(December 1920); rpt. National Amateur(January 1922); first collected in The Lovecraft Collectors Library,Volume 2 (1953); corrected text in D
The narrator wishes to tell of The Street, which was built by “men of strength and honour…good, valiant men of our blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea.” These were grave men in conical hats who had “bonneted wives and sober children” and enough courage to “subdue the forest and till the fields.” Two wars came; after the first, there were no more Indians, and after the second “they furled the Old Flag and put up a new Banner of Stripes and Stars.” After this, however, there are “strange puffings and shrieks” from the river, and “the air was not quite so pure as before”; but “the spirit of the place had not changed.” But now come “days of evil,” a time when “many who had known The Street of old knew it no more; and many knew it, who had not known it before.” The houses fall into decay, the trees are all gone, and “cheap, ugly new buildings” go up. Another war comes, but by this time “only fear and hatred and ignorance” brood over The Street because of all the “swarthy and sinister” people who now dwell in it. There are now such unheard-of places as Petrovitch’s Bakery, the Rifkin School of Modern Economics, and the Liberty Café. There develops a rumour that the houses “contained the leaders of a vast band of terrorists, who on a designated day are to initiate an “orgy of slaughter for the extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which The Street had loved”; this revolution is to occur, picturesquely, on the fourth of July. But a miracle occurs: without warning, the houses for some reason implode upon themselves, and the threat is gone.
HPL supplies the genesis of this manifestly racist story in a letter: “The Boston police mutiny of last year is what prompted that attempt—the magnitude and significance of such an act appalled me. Last fall it was grimly impressive to see Boston without bluecoats, and to watch the musket-bearing State Guardsmen patrolling the streets as though military occupation were in force. They went in pairs, determined-looking and khaki-clad, as if symbols of the strife that lies ahead in civilisation’s struggle with the monster of unrest and bolshevism” (HPL to Frank Belknap Long, November 11, 1920 [AHT]). The Boston police had gone on strike on September 8, 1919, and remained on strike well into October. The story was probably written shortly after the strike concluded. “The Street” restates the anti-immigrant message of such early poems as “New England Fallen” (1912?) and “On a New-England Village Seen by
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Moonlight” (1913). There may be an influence from Dunsany, as the stories in Tales of War(1918) have somewhat the same allegorical flavor (but without the racism).
Stubbs, Ermengarde.
In “Sweet Ermengarde,” the daughter of Hiram Stubbs, a bootlegger in Hogton, Vt, whose hand in marriage is sought by two swains, ‘Squire Hardman and Jack Manly. After a variety of adventures, she chooses the ’Squire.
Sully, Helen V. (1904–1997),
friend of Clark Ashton Smith (daughter of Genevieve Sully, a married woman with whom Smith carried on a longtime affair) and correspondent of HPL (1933–37). She visited HPL in Providence in early July 1933; HPL also took her to Newport, R.I.; Newburyport, Mass.; and elsewhere. HPL told her an impromptu ghost story one night in the churchyard of St. John’s Episcopal Church, frightening her so badly that she ran from the cemetery (see her memoir, “Memories of Lovecraft: II” [1971; rpt. LR]). After Providence, she went to New York, where HPL’s associates were captivated by her (Frank Belknap Long and Donald Wandrei threatened to fight a duel over her). She began corresponding with HPL after her return to California. Some of HPL’s replies suggest that Sully was despondent, perhaps even suicidal. He attempted to cheer her up by telling her his own situation was much worse but that he nevertheless found enough interest in life to continue. HPL’s biographer L. Sprague de Camp interpreted these remarks as displaying HPL’s own depressive and suicidal tendencies at the time, but such an interpretation seems wide of the mark.
“Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
Essay (28,230 words); written November 1925–May 1927 (revised in the fall of 1933, August 1934). First published in The Recluse(1927); revised version serialized (incomplete) in the Fantasy Fan (October 1933–February 1935); first complete publication of revised text in O;first separate publication: Ben Abramson, 1945; corrected text in D;critical edition (by S.T.Joshi): Hippocampus Press, 2000.
This is HPL’s most significant literary essay and one of the finest historical analyses of horror literature. W.Paul Cook had commissioned HPL to write “an article…on the element of terror & weirdness in literature” (HPL to Lillian D. Clark, November 11–14, 1925; ms., JHL) for his nowlegendary one-shot amateur magazine, The Recluse. HPL simultaneously refreshed himself on the classics of weird fiction and began writing parts of the text; most of it was completed before HPL left Brooklyn for Providence in April 1926, but HPL continued to discover new authors and works (e.g., Walter de la Mare in June 1926) and made numerous additions both to the final typescript and, as late as May 1927, to the proofs. The Recluseappeared in August, with HPL’s essay occupying nearly half the issue. It comprises ten chapters: I. Introduction; II. The Dawn of the Horror-Tale; III. The Early Gothic Novel; IV. The Apex of Gothic Romance; V. The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction; VI. Spectral Literature on the Continent; VII. Edgar Allan Poe; VIII. The Weird Tradition in America; IX. The Weird Tradition in the British Isles; X. The Modern Masters.
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Almost immediately upon completing his essay, HPL began taking notes for works to mention in a putative revised edition. These notes (largely a list of works), entitled “Books to mention in new edition of weird article,” are found at the back of his commonplace book. The chance to revise the text did not come until the fall of 1933, when Charles D.Hornig offered to serialize the text in the Fantasy Fan. HPL revised the essay all at once, sending a marked-up copy of The Recluseto Hornig; but the magazine folded with the serialization only having progressed to the middle of Chapter VIII. Although numerous faint prospects for the continuation of the serialization in other fan magazines emerged over the next two years, the essay was never republished in full until after HPL’s death. In August 1934 HPL’s discovery of William Hope Hodgson impelled him to write the essay “The Weird Work of William Hope Hodgson,” which was to be inserted into Chapter X. In April 1935 HPL read Gustav Meyrink’s novel The Golemand found that his description (based upon the early silent film version) was inaccurate, so he revised the passage accordingly.
The value of the essay is manifold. It is one of the first to provide a coherent historical analysis of the entire range of weird fiction from antiquity to HPL’s day. Dorothy Scarborough’s The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction(1917) is a thematic study, and Edith Birkhead’s The Tale of Terror(1921) —upon which HPL relied for much of the information in the first five chapters of his treatise—restricts its attention to the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. HPL’s discussions of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and Hodgson are particularly acute. His identification of the four “modern masters” of weird fiction—Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M.R.James—has been vindicated by subsequent research; the only likely addition to this list is HPL himself.