Details of the New York City Subway Map, 1929
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Following pages: details of the New York City subway map, 1929. 1 2 3 “They could not be upon any map of today…” — H.P. Lovecraft. “He” (1925). “What do maps and records and guide-books really tell [of the city, for] these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace, and yet there’s not a living soul to understand or profit by them.” — H.P. Lovecraft. “Pickman’s Model” (1926). “And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road [in urban London] will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled cities of Tibet” — Arthur Machen. The London Adventure (1924). IMAGE CREDITS. Front: Creative Commons photo by Zach Dischner, with substantial Photoshop alteration by the author. Other images are in the public domain due to their age, or are used here under a ‘fair use’ principle for the purpose of scholarly criticism and historical record. The author does not claim copyright over images so used. © David Haden, 2011. 4 WALKING WITH CTHULHU: H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26. by David Haden. 2011 5 CONTENTS Timeline of Key Dates. Introduction: A Walk in New York. SURFACE: Walking the Streets of the City. 1. H.P. Lovecraft and the psychogeographers. 2. H.P. Lovecraft’s night walks in New York: psychogeographic techniques. 3. The nature of the New York streets. 4. A note on H.P. Lovecraft and immigrants. 5. Lovecraft’s New York coffee houses and ice-cream parlours. UNDERGROUND: On the Monstrous, Occult, and Hidden. 6. H.P. Lovecraft and the subway. 7. It emerged from the subways! 8. On mystical and occult New York. 9. On H.P. Lovecraft and Franz Boas. 10. New York as R’lyeh, sunken city of Cthulhu. “Nyarlathotep” annotated. Bibliography. 6 TIMELINE OF KEY DATES 1920. Writes “Nyarlathotep”: set in a dream-landscape city at night. 1922. Apr 6th-12th: First ever visit to New York City. 1924. Mar 1924: Moves to New York. Lives at 259 Parkside Avenue, Brooklyn. 1924. Association with Houdini, completes “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”. 1924. Spring: Works briefly for The Reading Lamp, New York. 1924. About Aug: Financial calamity strikes Lovecraft and his new wife. 1924. Dec: His wife departs from New York to a new job in the Midwest. 1924. 31st Dec: Moves to “dismal hovel” at 169 Clinton Street, Brooklyn Heights. 1924. Pulp magazine market starts to become more formulaic and action-oriented. 1925. July. Reads Machen’s The London Adventure. 1925. 1st-2ndAug: Writes “The Horror at Red Hook”. Set in NYC. 1925. 12th-13th Aug: Writes out plot for “The Call of Cthulhu”. 1925. Aug: Writes “He”. Set in NYC. 1926. Mar: Writes “Cool Air”. Set in NYC. 1926. Apr: Final all-night walk. Leaves New York and returns to Providence. 1926. Sept: Two week stay in New York. 1928. Spring: Brief stay in New York. 1932-1933. Spends two Christmas weeks in New York with friends. 7 New York at dusk, showing trolley car (tram), motor car, Woolworths Bldg. Picture: GEC. Public Domain. 8 INTRODUCTION: A WALK IN NEW YORK r. H.P. Lovecraft stepped down onto the platform of New York’s MPennsylvania Station on the 6th day of April in 1922. He strolled out along the long platform, carrying his valise. Strolling was what he enjoyed best at that point in his life — his experience of urban walking and sauntering was generally that of joy, even exhilaration. He had raised this activity to a practiced and cultivated art, and it was also one of his few real joys in what can be regarded as a rather impoverished outward life. Sometimes it even verged on being a mania. He had learned how to walk observantly in his home town of Providence in New England, a place of ocean breezes and pleasant walking. By 1900 the town was neatly paved with bituminous macadam. This surface wore rather well 1 , but at that time there was probably not a great deal to wear it down — most of the traffic must have consisted of buses and commercial vehicles. The town was also a place from which bicycles were effectively banned by custom, except for those ridden by pre-adolescent boys. 2 Lovecraft thus lived in that paradisiacal age of the pedestrian, which lay somewhere between the decline of the horse in large cities and the pestilence of mass car ownership. 3 He also walked in some of the nearby Atlantic-facing towns and cities. Yet it was not in these, or in his genteel home town of Providence that Lovecraft most fully developed his proto-psychogeographic practices of walking, investigating, observing, and mentally recording for future literary and epistolary use. It was in that famous ‘ground zero’ of the impact of the truly modern world, 1 George W. Tillison, Street Pavements and Paving Materials: a manual of city pavements, 1900. “The city of Providence, R.I., has a large amount of streets paved with macadam which have given satisfaction.” 2 Only boys rode bicycles, since it was ‘not the done thing’ in the town for adults to ride them. See: S.T. Joshi, I Am Providence, p.887. 3 See: Peter D. Norton. Fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city. MIT Press, 2008. James F. Morton, one of the Lovecraft circle, was killed by a car in 1941. 9 New York City between 1922 4 and 1927. During this period the city joyfully broke down the barriers between high and low culture, between technology and art, creating new and potent cultural forms from the resulting mix — such as science fiction, jazz, new forms of musical theatre, cinema 5 , radio, comic books 6 , mass advertising, mass publishing. All the elements of a new culture, on which America would then found a new and often gaudy empire of the mind. It thus seems to me to be a very useful task to examine Lovecraft’s experiences and walking practices in New York, as that great city spun away from its past and careered toward a vigorous new type of modernity. Yet the city was much more than a glittering modern city for Lovecraft. It was that in the early months of his stay, but it soon came to be seen as a darker, older, and far more protean city 7 — at least on his many walks in the dead of night. As he threaded his way through a maze of tenuous and delicate mental impressions, in the night shadows and dawn glimmerings of New York City he found a new dream-city that could function 4 He had first visited New York in 1922, and not only as the usual tourist type. His first gothic exploration in New York seems to have been in 1922, when he... “I wrote it a year ago in New York, when I had been exploring an old Dutch cemetery in Flatbush, where the ancient gravestones are in the Dutch language”. This led to the story “The Hound”, written in 1922. Lovecraft quote from - Miscellaneous Writings, Arkham House, 1995. 5 The industry was not yet fully in Hollywood. The industry had grown up in the 1900s in New York, and even in the more advanced silent features era of the 1920s there was still much film-making activity in New York. Only animation seems to have been largely a West Coast phenomena. There seems to be some indication that McNeil of the Lovecraft Circle was involved in the industry in the 1910s. 6 Comics Monthly, from 1922, being essentially first. Published by the Embee Distribution Company of New York City. 7 His glorious first impression of it thus, in the company of Samuel Loveman in 1922 was later transmuted into fiction in “He”. New York would later become for him “the Pest Zone”, as Lovecraft’s attitudes changed ... "from Dunsanian fantasy of spires at sunset to the ‘pest zone,’ home of monstrous aliens, harbinger of the onrushing decline of the West. Lovecraft was not alone in such judgments... “When Freud and Jung visited New York some fifteen years earlier [1913], they noted similar [extremes]” - Faye Ringel. New England's Gothic literature: history and folklore of the supernatural from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. 10 simultaneously as an inspirational fever-dream, as a text, as an antiquarian reliquary, and as a sort of psychic comforter to aid him in his battle against the mundane and horrifyingly noisy reality of its daylight hours. Nor was he without guides to the self-aware practice of walking, as I will explain in the later essays in this book. Lovecraft and his circle spent several years, on and off, exploring the city by night, and from these experiences he shaped and sold the thrill of unspeakable fears and nightmares. 8 His walking was not in the rural ‘tromping’ style, or that of the rambling clubs then newly in vogue. 9 Rather it was walking of fits and starts, of zig-zags and jumps, of adventuresome following of intuition, of stopping to see, hear, and consider, to fondle the past and also any passing kitty-kat that might come with range. He under took his extensive series of walks just as the rest of New York was starting a new industrial revolution in the manufacture and sale of aspirational dreams and in the commercial redirection of the human desire for pleasure.