Walking With Cthulhu 2011 Web

8/9/2019 Walking With Cthulhu 2011 Web

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H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer, New York City 1924-26.

Following pages: details of the New York City subway map, 1929.


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“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.


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WALKING WITH

CTHULHU:

H.P. Lovecraft as psychogeographer,

New York City 1924-26.

by David Haden.

2011


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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-2nd Aug: 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.


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New York at dusk, showing trolley car (tram), motor car, Woolworths Bldg.

Picture: GEC. Public Domain.


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INTRODUCTION: A WALK IN NEW YORK

r. H.P. Lovecraft stepped down onto the platform of New York’sPennsylvania 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 whichhave given satisfaction.”

2 Only boys rode bicycles, since it was ‘not the done thing’ in the town for adults toride 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 . MITPress, 2008. James F. Morton, one of the Lovecraft circle, was killed by a car in 1941.

M


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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 ofa 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. Hisfirst gothic exploration in New York seems to have been in 1922, when he... “I wrote ita 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 “TheHound”, 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 1920sthere was still much film-making activity in New York. Only animation seems to havebeen largely a West Coast phenomena. There seems to be some indication that McNeilof the Lovecraft Circle was involved in the industry in the 1910s.

6 Comics Monthly , from 1922, being essentially first. Published by the EmbeeDistribution 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 “thePest 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 declineof the West. Lovecraft was not alone in such judgments. When Freud and Jung visitedNew York some fifteen years earlier [1913], they noted similar [extremes]” — FayeRingel, in New England's Gothic literature: history and folklore of the supernatural from theseventeenth through the twentieth centuries . Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.


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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 thepast 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. Lovecraft might thus be seen as the ‘dark other’ of the new

American dream machine. He and his friends delved into the slums, theancient wharfs and graveyards, the neglected back courtyards, the crumbling

churches and graveyards, the eerie wharfs, the winding alleys, plumbing the

depths of the rapidly-widening civilisation chasm opening between the hoary

past and the brash new modernity. 10 Out of this chasm he dredged the

8 Lovecraft was always acutely sensitive to places and landscapes with any real sense of

history in them. Even on his first ‘deep’ tour of the city in 1925, as night falls he startedto notice... “odd musty warehouses, queer old corners”, presumably storing them awayas potential literary settings. Letters from New York, p.53. He does not often write muchin his letters of the night trips, seeming to prefer to leave it to the later fiction to expressthe details. Perhaps he thought his aunts would not be interested in the fine detailsserved up again and again.

9 See George Kirk’s letters for his accounts of the tedium of a New York ramblingclub, and the boring personalities to be found therein. To be found in Mara Kirk Hartand S.T. Joshi (eds.) Lovecraft’s New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927 .

Hippocampus Press, 2006.10 The other major New York ‘outsider’ artist of the time, Joseph Cornell, undertook asimilar strategy of recovering the past. But Cornell found it among the carefullyselected detritus of popular culture in junk stores, second-hand bookshops, and thriftstores. Cornell’s famous shadow box work was first shown in 1932 - had he seen these


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elements of what would, in time, establish his own weirdly dark and now

seemingly eternal empire of the fantastic. 11 For instance, he found walking

useful for working up a mood suitable for creation, and the plot for the

famous “The Call of Cthulhu” was written directly after a marathon all-night

walking session in the city. 12

Lovecraft’s expeditions into the night of New York City were near-

contemporaneous with the more well-known night walks of the Surrealists in

Paris. 13 In a city just a few years away from the brink of a new car-borne

hostility to the pedestrian, his walking, Lovecraft’s cross-cutting of histories,

his seeking out of little known routes, his stopping to look up at the buildings

instead of into shop windows, his stepping back into the street for a better view — all these acts can be seen as implicit varieties of subversion of the

‘normal’ commercial experience of the modern city. His actual techniques 14 ,

and those of his companions interestingly anticipated some of those used in

the walks of the Situationists in the 1950s and early 1960s. 15 His

antiquarianism and attention to the old vernacular of the streets, and to the

layered and confused pasts of the city edge-lands, has many parallels with the

‘London turn’ in the modern psychogeography of the 1990s and 2000s. He

works Lovecraft might have rather liked the themes of astronomy, the cosmic, andchildhood nostalgia/play in the works – but it is very unlikely Lovecraft ever knew ofCornell.

11 I say ‘eternal’ because his works are not cherished as dusty museum-pieces, likethose of many literary people of the time, but are still actively re-interpreted, re-shaped,

and expanded upon. Any mythos that lasts a century, as Lovecraft’s has almost done(the anniversary of its inception will be in 2017, since “Dagon” dates from 1917), whilestill staying alive and changing and inspiring, seems to me to stand a good chance ofkeeping going for several more centuries yet.

12 S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005.p.172.

13 His vivid dream-narrative walk in a New York-like city at night in “Nyarlathotep”(1920) clearly predates the 1924-5 walks in Paris that inspired Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926). The matter of influence is discussed in a later essay in this book.

14 Summarised in a later essay in this book.

15 Outlined in a later chapter in this book. The key work is: Ken Knabb. SituationistInternational Anthology . Bureau of Public Secrets, 2010. Specifically Guy Debord’s“Theory of the Dérive” (1958) given in Knabb.


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was not simply being ‘a tourist’ or some fogeyish daytime architectural train-

spotter. Like the classic Paris flaneur, Lovecraft perceived modernity well

enough — he marveled at its flow of seductive images when done well,

enjoyed its childishly garish ice-cream parlours, ate at the coffee shops and

the automats (all night self-service cafes), went on the amusements at ConeyIsland, and visited its vast new cinemas and theatres. To illuminate this,

Christopher Morley usefully gives a vivid glimpse of the New York street-

scape in 1935 with modernity crowding in, seemingly from the edges…

“Walking on crowded city streets at night, watching the lighted

windows, delicatessen shops, peanut carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free

lunch counters piled with crackers and saloon cheese, and minorpoets struggling home with the Saturday night marketing […] the

great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream soda,

electrical sky-signs…” 16

But in turning his back on the modern and on the legendary American

‘compulsory cheerfulness’, he became for a moment something that now

seems a crucial addendum to New York’s literary history — a conscious ‘anti-collector’ collecting impressions of overlooked places rather than objects,

righting wrongs being done upon the city by modernity through a kind of

psychic collection and excavation of dark places, seeking out the obverse of

modernity and making it into highly subjective fictional detours that

nevertheless rested very much on his experiences in real places…

“… hidden in cryptical recesses which no street, lane, or passagewayconnects with the Manhattan of today!” 17

In short order 18 he succeeded in powerfully re-imagining the city as

haunted by its suppressed ‘other’, the hoary and hidden past. He did not so

16 Christopher Morley, essay on “The Art Of Walking” (1935).

17 S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005. p.61.

18 Lovecraft often required about a year or two to fully ‘absorb’ his memories of aplace and weave it into his fiction. Or else he wrote it almost immediately the moodcame upon him. Often Lovecraft could only write about a place when away from it.


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much ‘re-enchant places’ — as the Romantics had tried to do, and the neo-

Romantics in Britain were then still trying to do — as to ‘re-nightmare’

them. In a later chapter I will argue that he succeeded in doing this, not for

any one place in the city, but for the whole of New York City.

Like many psychogeographers 19 , Lovecraft also had a clear ideology and

philosophical vision. This was certainly not the ideology of the far left,

which seems common to most psychogeographers. But there are striking

similarities nevertheless. 20 Like those on the political left, he also railed and

chafed against the crassness and alienage of the modern commercial city, and

sought to combat it in visionary words. Like the literary pacifist anarchists

he engaged in a form of radical idleness — a reluctance toward paid regular work that was an effective refusal of it.

He also engaged in the typical bohemian modus operandi of ‘anti-

consumption’, happiest with the idea of the city as garden and as museum, as

basically free and pleasurable — the free pleasures of the parks, pet shops 21 ,

the public libraries and museums, the art galleries, street cats, even the joy of

lingering in a café over a cheap coffee in the small hours so as to be able toread the free morning-edition papers, and talking with like-minded friends

on long night walks. Such free pleasures are, of course, one of the rights and

prerogatives of the talented artist. If society refuses to pay now for what it

will value only after one’s death, then one is perfectly entitled to sponge upon

it mercilessly. Lovecraft did just that, becoming a lifelong expert at getting a

free ride and then walking away leaving everyone smiling.

19 From a wide-ranging short introduction to psychogeography and its history, seeMerlin Coverley’s Psychogeography (2nd Ed.). Pocket Essentials, 2010.

20 More understandable if one views fascism as arising as a heretical sect withinsocialism, and one is aware of the ways that socialism was itself implicated with eugenicsand anti-semitism between the wars.



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Lovecraft’s passion for a certain type of meanderingly investigatory and

often performative 22 walking was not without some personal limitations.

His extreme sensitivity to the cold meant that walking was, with a few

notable exceptions 23 , a passion only enthusiastically undertaken in pleasant

weather. This must have given his walking more glamour than if he hadbeen someone who had been habitually called upon to trudge about among

the harsh weather of a New England winter. Lovecraft was also prone to

fainting 24 , or so he thought himself to be based on occurrences when he was

younger. This probably meant the pavement was always something of a

worry for him, and seems to have been linked in his mind to cold weather.

He was a moderately big man by the standards of the time, and would nodoubt have fallen heavily if he had fainted. At the back of his mind he may

always have had the then-common and chilling saying of American children’s

street culture of the time:— “Step on a crack, break your back!” 25 He could

ill afford hospital bills. In time it was this young children’s street culture

which would be a platform for the first powerful new studies of ‘the

overlooked’ in the city streets. Children’s street chalkings in 1930s and 40s

New York, for instance, have inspired one of the 20th century’s greatest

photography books, Helen Levvitt’s In The Street: chalk drawings and

messages, New York City 1938–1948 (1987). 26

22 Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for walking was especially potent and even manic when withfriends, ‘showing them around’ a place he had already explored and researched. Hefrequently amazed and exhausted his companions, with an urgent verbal and arm-

waving conveyance of ‘lost’ narratives, until they begged for the café, the train station,or the subway entrance.

23 Such as the January 1925 view of New York under a total eclipse of the Sun, and what must have been a chilly January walk in Greenwood Cemetery. Possibly there wassome benefit from the ‘heat-island’ effect in built-up parts of the city.

24 S.T. Joshi. I Am Providence . Hippocampus Press, 2010. This may have been partlydue to the type if nourishment he was getting, or the lack of it.

25 This fear may account for some of his phobias about things like the seemingly-

endless subway entrance steps leading down into the gloom.26 Levvitt’s book is a high water mark of a huge treasure house of 20th century streetphotography, a photography which is especially rich as a record of young children’s ownstreet culture — before that culture was obliterated or pushed onto pavements and intoback yards by the proliferation of the motor car. This cultural tradition, passed on in a


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Children playing in New York, circa 1930s, cars starting to dominate the streets.

Picture: Elliott Erwitt. The New York Public Library.

Other elements of city streets still exist to be noticed and used in creative

work. For instance the Victorian and Edwardian grates and manhole covers

that first seem to have been written about eloquently by the British poet and

antiquarian John Betjeman, and which were (much later) photographed by

various documentary photographers and photobook makers in both America

and Britain. What lies beneath the manhole covers, such as the massive

Victorian sewer architecture, has also been more appreciated and properly

photographed in recent decades. The white picket fences and hardy weedsadjacent to urban walks have been pictured by some of America’s finest

photographers, such as Ansel Adams and John Szarkowski. The shadows on

the streets of New York were wonderfully captured in a series of etchings by

Martin Lewis, now held by the Smithsonian. Much of historic interest is

probably still there in the urban streets to be documented — such as

fragile and inventive manner from child to child, was the most ephemeral and valuabletreasure of the pre-car streets. It is almost lost to us now except frozen in stillphotography and recorded in the 1960s and 70s ‘rescue’ ethnography of researchers likeIona Opie.


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endangered street sounds. But the young children’s culture, and increasingly

the cats, now seem all but gone from the streets.

Lovecraft was rarely alone when walking. He often had the intelligent

company of eager and bookish youths and young men, some of whom he

considered to be and indeed whom he called his ‘children’, on his night

walks…

“He liked to take long peripatetic walks, like Aristotle, with his

conversants, as if to guarantee their presence only for him.” 27

Even when alone he was communing with the shades of the past 28, and

also with a seemingly endless stream of passing cats. 29 No street cat, if

willing to be coaxed, could escape being fondled and caressed, and conversed

with in ancient tongues. Here is just one example from the letters…

“I worked slowly southward by the light of a waning misty moon

[…] amongst the curious houses, imagination-kindling streets, &

innumerable kitty-cats …” 30

Lovecraft had a simple and potent secret for attracting the cats that headored all of his life... “I always have a supply of catnip on hand”. 31

Doubtless he had some catnip packed and ready for use in New York, as he

stepped along the platform of the Pennsylvania Station that fateful day when

he first arrived in New York City in April 1922.

27 Timo Airaksinen. The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft: the route to horror . Lang, 1999. p.5.

28 See Lovecraft’s New York story “He” for one of the most potent visualisations ofthis idea in fictional form.

29 One has to presume cats were far more numerous and venturesome before theadvent of the cat-massacring mass car-culture and drug-addled yobs. Indeed Lovemancommented that... “One of the quaintest features of all colonial New York is thenumber of cats seen at large…” — S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from NewYork. Night Shade, 2005. p.74.

30 Long all-night solo walk of early August 1925. S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters:Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005. p.170.

31 In a letter by Lovecraft, given on p.54 of Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft: Writers of theDark, Wildside Press, 2005.


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Pennsylvania Station, NYC, 1910 publicity shot.

Picture: Public Domain

Pennsylvania Station, NYC. By Bernice Abbott, printed 1935.

Picture: Public Domain.


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Tailors & drapers shop, New York City, circa 1910s. Lovecraft spent many weeks in

1925 scouring the city for new $25 suits, after burglaries. Picture: Public Domain.


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SURFACE:

WALKING THE STREETS OF THE CITY


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1 : H.P. LOVECRAFT AND THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHERS

think Lovecraft’s New York night walks deserve more attention from

scholars than the very fleeting and uncomprehending glances that they

have so far had from Lovecraftians. There are obvious similarities to the

more celebrated manifestations and practitioners of psychogeography. This

essay surveys the psychogeographic tradition, with special attention given to

drawing parallels with Lovecraft’s experiences in New York and showing his

linkages with some of the same roots as psychogeography has.

Lovecraft’s New York City night walks seem to have consciously arisen from

his knowledge of the activities and practices of earlier writers. 1 One might

firstly point to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which has

been described by psychogeographers in terms that would very much fitLovecraft’s approach…

“This blend of fiction and biography, of local history and personal

reminiscence, is bound together to form an imaginative reworking of

the city in which the familiar layout of the city is shown to be

transformed beyond recognition [by the ravages of the plague]” 2

Lovecraft was an expert on 18th century literature, and there was an editionof Journal of the Plague Year in his library at his death. 3 Then there is the

1 Anne D. Wallace names the mode of literature arising from such knowing walking as‘the peripatetic’ in her book Walking, literature, and English culture: the origins and uses of peripatetic in the nineteenth century . Clarendon Press, 1993. In its 18th century origins this is

as understood as a… “cultivating labour capable of renovating both the individual andhis society by recollecting and expressing past value.”

2 Merlin Coverley. Psychogeography (2nd ed.). Pocket Essentials, 2010. pp.36-37.

3 S.T. Joshi. Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue (2nd Rev. Ed.). Hippocampus Press, 2002.

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work of John Thelwall 4 , and the night rambles of Coleridge, and De

Quincey 5…

“For De Quincey the city becomes a riddle, a puzzle still perplexing

writers and walkers to this day, and he establishes a vision of city

replayed by later devotees of the urban gothic such as Robert Louis

Stevenson and Arthur Machen. These authors continue the

tradition of writer as walker, established, at least in urban form, by

De Quincey and present the city as a dreamscape in which nothing is

as it seems and which can only be navigated by those possessing

secret knowledge.” 6

“Some of these rambles led me to great distances; for an opium-eater

is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes, in my

attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my

eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west

passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and head-lands I

had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such

knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and suchsphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive,

baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of

hackney-coachmen, I could almost have believed at times, that I

must be the first discoverer of some of these terra incognita, and

doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts

of London.”

— De Quincey, Confessions of an English opium-eater (1821).

4 John Thelwall , The Peripatetic (1793). Rebecca Solnit in her Wanderlust: A History ofWalking (2006), sees him as a progenitor, setting... “something of a pattern: autodidacts who took the trinity of radical politics, love of nature, and pedestrianism to extremes.”

5 Lovecraft was a self-taught expert on 18th century literature and architecture, andknew of night-time expeditions by De Quincey and others. In this respect it isinteresting that Christopher Morley’s essay The Art of Walking (1935) states in hishistorical survey that… “I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not muchpractised before the eighteenth century.”

6 Merlin Coverley. Psychogeography (2nd Ed.). Pocket Essentials, 2010. p.17.


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Lovecraft also knew of the depiction of the London streets at night in

Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous horror novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde (1887), and probably was able to recall the biographical details of

the London night-walks of poets such as William Blake and Francis

Thompson. 7 There was also a touch of the 1890s performative dandyism ofOscar Wilde mingled with Lovecraft’s New York experience 8 although I

cannot see any particularly strong link from Lovecraft to systematic night-

walking in the works or life of Wilde. 9

Edgar Allen Poe also took night walks, which surfaced in his London story

“The Man of The Crowd” (1840), and in his “The Murders in the Rue

Morgue” (1841), among others. Lovecraft may have been influenced byCharles Hemstreet’s Literary New York: its landmarks and associations 10 which

he read in late November 1924. It is a good short survey, with much to say

about Poe and his circle in New York, and with lines on night walking such

as…

“In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping

town, the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses”

7 Kalem Club member George Kirk recommended him in his letters, as one of the fewpoets of the 19th century worth reading. Although now forgotten except by ardentCatholic historians, Thompson was once counted among this ‘canon’ of London night- walkers. As evidence I can give this quote from 1907…

“Blake, who was perhaps half-Insane, needed neither alcohol nor drug to openhis eyes to the [night-walking] world of strange shapes and terrors; but all the

others — Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe, James Thomson, and Francis Thompson …” - The Nation , 1907.

Lovecraft knew of Dowson, since he mentions them in his letters - S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) TheLovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005. p.162.

8 On the latter, see his fastidious attention to dress and the Sunday tradition of theKalem Club to promenade in best suits and dandy canes down Clinton Street. ForRheinhart Kleiner’s full account of this, see: S.T. Joshi. Lovecraft’s New York Circle .Hippocampus Press, 2006. p.225.

9 Although some might see links with clandestine male-male encounters in thedarkened streets. See Lovecraft’s story “He” (1925), and Matt Cook’s London and theCulture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914. On New York City see George Chauncey’s Gay NewYork: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.

10 Charles Hemstreet. Literary New York: its landmarks and associations . Putnam’s, 1903.


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“McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall Park over

the way, and sat there through many a long summer night —

dreaming over his Elixir of Moonshine ”

“walk away along the street remembering that in Poe’s time it was a

delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he

wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep

problems of The Universe. […] Walk over the path there, high

above the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came

to Poe for that requiem of despair, the mystic Ulalume .”

And also with the suggesting of nocturnal ‘time travel’…

“At night, when it [Frankfort Street] is silent and deserted, it

suggests the time, far back in the year 1678”

Lovecraft had probably also read Thoreau’s famous essay “Walking”, since

it was very widely anthologised.…

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who

understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, — who had agenius, so to speak, for sauntering …”

Perhaps he had even read Robert Cortes Holliday, said to be “the

American Belloc”, in his book Walking Stick Papers (1918). Here he would

have found musings on the use of the cane for walking 11 , and also a

strikingly homosocial edict on the nature of walking…

“No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should evergo a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in

arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of

men’s given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall be

named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and two,

since the world began, there have always been young men who have

thus to one another plighted their troth [i.e. married] . If one is not

still one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for

11 Lovecraft seemed very fond of his walking canes.


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him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys.” —

Walking Stick Papers

Then there is Arthur Machen, who offered a similarly exact guide to

walking, and who has been hailed as a proto-psychogeographer. Lovecraft

discovered his works in 1923. Machen was an author of both fiction and

non-fiction who …

“seeks out the strange and otherworldly within our midst — a single

street, event or object capable of transforming the most mundane

surroundings into something strange or sinister, revealing that point

of access, called the Northwest Passage by De Quincey, which

provides an unexpected shortcut to the magical realm behind our

own.” 12

The second and third volumes of Machen’s autobiography: Things Near

and Far (1923); and The London Adventure ; of the art of wandering (1924) 13 ,

must have been a key and very timely influence on Lovecraft. 14 The London

Adventure is at once an itinerant story, a topography, an instructional manual

for walking, a text of performative writing, and an autobiography. 15

Machen’s fiction was discovered by Lovecraft in the Spring of 1923, and he

swiftly became a devotee. In these two later Machen autobiographies, of

which Lovecraft purchased his own copies at Scribner’s in October 1924 16 ,

he found not only the supernatural but also much that spoke to his love of

walking and old architecture…

“London was undisturbed in those days. Holywell Street and WychStreet were all in their glory in 1885, a glory compounded of

12 Merlin Coverley. Psychogeography (2nd Ed.). Pocket Essentials, 2010. p.18.

13 Sadly, this book is firmly out-of-print until 2018 when it becomes public domain.

14 He read them just before his key burst of highly productive night-walking in August1925.

15 Lovecraft read The London Adventure in July 1925, and thus would it have influenced“He”, among others. See: S.T. Joshi. Lovecraft’s Library: a catalogue . HippocampusPress, 2002. p.99. Lovecraft’s library also contained Things Near and Far (1923).

16 S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005.


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sixteenth-century gables, bawdy books and matters congruous

therewith, parchment Elzevirs, dark courts and archways, hidden

taverns, and ancient slumminess.” — Things Near and Far.

Machen also makes an implicitly political critique of the very blunt tools

then available to the urban planner, social reformer, and early urban

ethnographer, in terms of the mapping of more than the simplest elements in

the social geography of cities…

“You may point out a street, correctly enough, as the abode of

washerwomen; but, in that second floor, a man may be studying

chaldee roots, and in the garret over the way a forgotten artist is

dying by inches.” — A Fragment of Life.

Machen point to ways of cultivating the wonder to be found among

ordinary or neglected places which may nevertheless evoke rare sensory

impressions…

“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 will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in

the heart of Africa, not in the fabled cities of Tibet” — Things Near

and Far.

“It is possible, just dimly possible, that the real pattern and scheme of

life is not in the least apparent on the outward surface of things,

which is the world of common sense and rationalism and reasoned

deductions; but rather lurks, half-hidden, only apparent in certain

rare lights, and then only to the prepared eye; a secret pattern, an

ornament which seems to have but little relation or none at all to the

obvious scheme of the universe.” — The London Adventure .

Machen also suggested the making of ‘random’ adventures by wandering

the city without maps…

“I began now to appreciate the fact that if you set out, without a

map, from your house at 36 Great Russell Street and walk for half an


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hour eastward or northward you are in fact in an unknown region, a

new world” — Things Near and Far.

This approach to walking seems to have first emerged in the 1890s, in

Machen’s novella A Fragment of Life (begun in 1899)…

“I didn’t buy a map; that would have spoilt it, somehow; to see

everything plotted out, and named, and measured. What I wanted

was to feel that I was going where nobody had been before” — A

Fragment of Life.

Machen also suggested early, in his Novel of the Iron Maid (1890), a linkage

between fantasy and random walking, in terms of conjuring up the feelings of

fantasy that can come upon those walking in deserted streets at night…

“Before me was the long suburban street, its dreary distance marked

by rows of twinkling lamps, and the air was poisoned by the faint,

sickly smell of burning bricks; it was not a cheerful prospect by any

means, and I had to walk through nine miles of such streets, deserted

as those of Pompeii. I knew pretty well what direction to take, so I

set out wearily, looking at the stretch of lamps vanishing in

perspective: and as I walked street after street branched off to right

and left, some far reaching, to distances that seemed endless,

communicating with other systems of thoroughfare, and some mere

protoplasmic streets, and ending suddenly in waste, and pits, and

rubbish heaps, and fields whence the magic had departed. I have

spoken of systems of thoroughfare, and I assure you that walkingalone through these silent places I felt fantasy growing on me, and

some glamour of the infinite.” — Novel of the Iron Maid (1890).

One of Machen’s inspirations might be found in the late 18th century work

by John Thelwall, The Peripatetic (1793) which has a similarly radical

structure to The London Adventure , and a similar revolutionary view of the

nature and potentials of walking in London as a political/creative practice.


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Thelwall seems to me be one of the key roots of the whole tradition, since he

influenced Coleridge in terms of his night walks. 17

Machen tried to develop his ideas to such a systematic extent that in The

London Adventure he repeatedly calls this approach to walking his ‘London

science’ and like terms. Thus he gave his activities a systematic cast, an

approach he presumably then communicated to Lovecraft through a reading

of the autobiography in 1925.18 The knowledge Lovecraft had from Machen

seems very significant in making a claim for his having made a shift from

simple antiquarian tourist to proto-psychogeographer by summer 1925, and

in a manner that can stand comparison with the approaches of the early

surrealists and the early Situationist International. He also had contact withParis bohemia in 1925, since he was receiving regular lengthy letters from

Alfred Galpin. 19 As he read Machen and others, Lovecraft must have

repeatedly glimpsed that it is possible to make of walking a systematic and

experimental practice.

ut what of the surrealists, who were operating in Paris at the same time

as Lovecraft was in New York? Lovecraft may have known of the new

surrealist tendency in art and literature from the English-language cultural

magazines, which must have reported on what was then happening in Paris.

Then there was also Lovecraft’s good friend Alfred Galpin who was in Paris

17

Nicholas Roe. “Coleridge and John Thelwall: the Road to Nether Stowey” in: TheColeridge Connection , 2nd edition, 2007. In England there is an older non-literarytradition, in which walking is essentially a small-p political practice. This lies in the factthat while the close-packed island is almost entirely built up and demarcated byboundaries in the urban areas, there are nevertheless countless small paths, waysthrough, shortcuts, and ‘desire’ paths that unofficially permeate it almost everywhere. Ifthe English cultural tradition is ‘the invention of tradition’, then on the ground thistakes the form of the ad-hoc invention of unofficial shortcuts known only to locals.

18 This theme had also been developed in fiction in The Hill of Dreams (1907) based onMachen’s time in London. From which… “trivial and common things were acutelysignificant”. Lovecraft also read Machen’s book on aesthetics, Hieroglyphics, in summer1925.

19 Galpin was in Paris in 1925, see the next section of this essay for details. S.T. Joshi.(Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005. p.162.

B


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in 1925, seemingly for a year, as an impoverished bearded bohemian music

student. Although Galpin had reportedly ‘given up literature’ at that time,

he sent very lengthy reports on Paris to Lovecraft. 20 Possibly among these

were some accounts of the latest trends in art in the city. Perhaps this is

what we see surfacing in the line from “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926)…

“… a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous

Dream Landscape in the Paris spring salon of 1926” 21

However, Lovecraft appears to have been more interested in Galpin’s

accounts of walking among the medieval streets of the city, which he

mentions in his own letters. 22 Yet there was another Paris connection.

Galpin’s French wife came to New York and stayed with the Lovecraft Circle

in 1925. She was extremely intelligent and literary and had just come from

Paris. She was admitted as a rare guest to one of the Kalem Club group

meetings on August 22nd-23rd 1925, where…

“The presence of one direct from Paris gave a Gallick tone to the

conversation” 23

It seems unimaginable that the circle would not have asked about the latest

literary trends in Paris, although Aragon’s Paris Peasant would not be

published until 1926. The very next night Lovecraft went on an immense

all-night exploration with Kirk, “covering 90 blocks”. 24

20 S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005.p.163. Sadly, Galpin destroyed Lovecraft’s letters to him, only 27 now surviving.

21 This also bears a slight resemblance to one of Lovecraft’s early lost stories called“The Picture”... “[in] one of the juvenile tales I destroyed [...] I had a man in a Parisgarret paint a mysterious canvas embodying the quintessential essence of all horror.” This idea was then later used as a basis for “Pickman’s Model”.


23 Ibid. p.178. During Morton’s youth... “he also spent considerable time in France which enabled him to use the French language fluently.” From “Memorial of James F.Morton”, American Mineralogist .

24 Ibid. p.182.


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After his death Lovecraft was certainly seen to have had strong surrealist

tendencies, even if he did not know them as such while he was alive. 25 As

early as 1943 the surrealist journal VVV featured a groundbreaking and

positive study of Lovecraft and his work by Robert Allerton Parker. 26 This

was in the early years of a short revival of fantastic literature, which beganafter Lovecraft’s death with William Sloane’s To Walk the Night (1937).

Then in the mid 1970s Frank Rosemont, in his influential Arsenal surrealist

book-cum-magazine, wrote that…

“the Lovecraft Circle grasped the essence of the surrealist view,

verified by all great examples of the past, that it is impossible to

create anything of significance by expressing only the manifest

content of an age” […] “The intuitive insistence on the awesome,

truly limitless possibilities opened, in the epoch of the worker’s

councils 27 , gives his and his comrades works an implicitly

revolutionary character forever unattainable by explicitly ‘socialist’

novels.”

Sadly, no-one in modern American surrealism appears to have significantly

followed the lead of Parker and Rosemont in seeing Lovecraft as a fellow

traveler with surrealism. Possibly this has something to do with the

revelations about Lovecraft’s politics in the 1970s and 80s. Had he been a

card-carrying leftist, he would no doubt have continued to be feted by such

groups to this day. As it was, while these American surrealists were able to

draw early and indicative parallels between Lovecraft’s fiction and surrealism,they would not have the biographical materials that would have enabled them

25 Certainly the early French translations of Lovecraft were welcomed with open armsby the French surrealists in the 1950s, although some appear to have rather tediouslyclaimed that the work... “reflects an authentic occult knowledge” (Gérard Legrand).

26 Robert Allerton Parker. “Such Pulp as Dreams Are Made On” (with illustrations byHans Bok). VVV , 2-3, March 1943, pp.64-65. Reprinted in A Weird Writer in Our Midst: Early Criticism of H. P. Lovecraft. Hippocampus Press, 2010.

27 He is referring to Paris 1968 and its aftermath, the workers councils of Portugal inthe 1970s, etc.


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to catch sight of the thematic and chronological parallels between Lovecraft

and some of the seminal early Surrealist texts on walking in the city. 28 I

refer, of course, to the famous surrealist texts such as the nocturnal walks

recorded in Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) 29 , one of the central and

earliest seminal works of literary surrealism, walks that werecontemporaneous with the night walks of Lovecraft and his circle in New

York.

Some Lovecraftians might at first suspect that Aragon, perhaps only read

about by Lovecraft in a book review, forms a possible alternative inspiration

for Lovecraft’s night walks and an alternative to those 18th century works and

later authors I have here outlined in the previous pages. But there seems tohave been no direct influence of either man upon the other. Aragon’s 1926

book came out too late to influence Lovecraft in New York, and Aragon’s

work was strongly inspired by Vitezslav Nezval’s long poem “The Wondrous

Magician” (1922), which makes of the Eastern European cultural capital of

Prague a shadowy and fantastical realm. 30 There also seems to me to be an

obvious influence from the ancient Jewish Golem story 31 and the Eastern

28 Nor have any of the writers on psychogeography, which arises partly fromsurrealism, caught sight of Lovecraft. The same can be said as the academic workundertaken on the traditions of the ‘writer as walker as artist’ and ‘walking art’.

29 Aragon’s book was followed by others that examined the night and the city. Bretonfollowed with Nadja (1928) and Soupault with Les Dernieres Nuits de Paris (1928), amongothers. Lovecraft may have seen some of these reviewed in English after he hadreturned to Providence. Somewhat later Brassai produced a book of night photographs

of Paris called L’Amour Fou (1937).30 This can be found in English in Alfred French’s The Poets of Prague: Czech poetry betweenthe wars . Oxford University Press, 1969. If seems to have first appeared in 1922 in TheRevolutionary Anthology of Devetsil . The title may come from Shelley’s translation of scenesfrom The Wondrous Magician , and the theme certainly comes from the classic Jewish storyof the Golem. It seems Lovecraft never saw either “The Wondrous Magician” or ParisPeasant (translation published 1971 in English).

31 Lovecraft did mention The Golem by Gustave Meyrink in his Supernatural Horror inLiterature (1927), which he wrote while in New York, but he was only able to read it in

the mid 1930s. Therefore it cannot have been an influence on him in the 1920s.Interestingly, one can see in the golem one of the roots of the concept of the New Yorksuperhero, especially as comics in the city were largely a Jewish industry. See: DannyFingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, and manyother recent academic history books on the Jewish roots of the comic book.


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European gothic traditions. Yet… there was also that rather elliptic

‘Northwest Passage’ by which De Quincey was conveyed into the tradition of

Baudelaire’s flâneur 32 by Edgar Allen Poe’s London story “The Man of The

Crowd” (1840), and thus influenced Aragon. Lovecraft knew Poe intimately,

so there is a sort on tenuous linkage there. There is also the interestingpossibility of an Arthur Machen influence on Aragon’s Paris Peasant — but

if there were any explicit links between Aragon and the ‘London science’ of

night walking which Machen had so explicitly set out in print in 1923 and

1924, then these have long since been swept under the carpet of history.

Despite this apparent lack of influence from/to Lovecraft, Aragon seems

to have independently shared Lovecraft’s antiquarian interests. The firstsection of Paris Peasant is an examination of the final days of an old Parisian

arcade before being demolished, which Aragon characterised as “faceless

monsters” full of “modern myths”…

“Although the life that originally quickened them has drained away,

they deserve, nevertheless, to be regarded as the secret repositories of

several modern myths: it is only today, when the pickaxe menacesthem, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of

the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and

professions. Places that were incomprehensible yesterday and that

tomorrow will never know.” — Paris Peasant .

Then there are the times Aragon’s prose in Paris Peasant , at least in its

1971 English translation by Simon Watson-Taylor, seems almostLovecraftian in its themes — we are shown images arising from metaphors of

marine and coastal life, sphinxes that haunt the city in the form of manikins,

barriers against infinity, we peer into “disquieting atmospheres of places”…

“The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts

and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though

plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses

32 “The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire” — this line is the opening of Lovecraft’s “The Crawling Chaos” (1921).


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of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols.

[…] The disquieting atmospheres of places contains similar locks

which cannot be bolted fast against infinity. Wherever the living

pursue particularly ambiguous activities, the inanimate may

sometimes assume the reflection of their most secret motives: andthus our cities are peopled with unrecognized sphinxes which will

never stop the passing dreamer and ask him mortal questions unless

he first projects his meditations, his absence of mind, towards them.”

— Paris Peasant.

The similarly between the approaches and symbolic imaginaries of

Lovecraft and Aragon at the same moment in history is then surely just oneof an uncanny and chance coincidence and synchronicity. I have to assume

that there was just something about the culture in certain large cities at that

moment in history, between the disappearance of the horse and before the

deadly onslaught of the motor car, in that sudden emergence of the vast

chasm between the old world and modernity, that opened the streets of large

cities to the primed imaginations of nocturnal wanderers and dreamers.

The final half of Paris Peasant is a dizzying meditation on nature in the

city, leading to a metaphysical ending that points out the ways that language

serves to distort the ways we can glimpse reality. Aragon attempts a

description of what one might call ‘a new reason of the imaginary’. This is

implicitly linked to the supernatural, via Aragon’s definition in Paris Peasant

of the supernatural as…

“Le merveilleux, c’est la contradiction qui apparait dans le réel.”

… and in English this is given as, in various translations…

“The fantastic, it is a contradiction apprehended in the real.”

“The fantastic is the contradiction that appears in the real.”

“The marvelous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.”


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Crucially, Andre Breton 33 once imagined in the 1920s that the best framing

device for a small ‘found-object’ that served as an ‘eruption of the marvelous’

in the everyday streetscape might be a...

“vitrine-bibliothèque” containing Gothic novels — “cette literature

ultra-romanesque, archi-sophistiquee”— a small edifice dedicated to

fear. 34

Breton was perhaps thinking here of gothic horror literature as a proven

mode of effective world-changing action, from Horace Walpole’s initial The

Castle of Otranto (1764) through to Ruskin and William Morris into the

benign arts & crafts variant of 19th century British socialism. If so then he

was wrong about this chain of influence 35 — but Lovecraft may have also

had the same attitude at the back of his mind, albeit unconsciously and

without Breton’s erroneous linkage with socialism.

It may perhaps seem strange to some young readers to imagine that writing

a horror book would fundamentally and irrevocably change the fabric of lived

and built reality for the next generation. Yet that is what happened with the

gothic revival, which arose most potently and widely in the popular form of

33 Interestingly, in his later pronouncements, for instance in the Prolegomena to a ThirdSurrealist Manifesto or Not (1942), one might even think he had been reading Lovecraft oncosmicism. But that would be well after Lovecraft’s death...

“Man is perhaps not the centre, the cynosure of the universe. One can go sofar as to believe that there exist above him, on the animal scale, beings whosebehaviour is as strange to him as his may be to the mayfly or the whale. [...] Anew myth? Must these beings be convinced that they result from a mirage ormust they be given a chance to show themselves?”

34 Haim N. Finkelstein, “’L’objet insolite’ in Breton’s writings”, in his own Surrealismand the Crisis of the Object , UMI Research Press, 1980. p19. In the 1920s, gothic criticismas a field had not yet emerged in English, there was only Edith Birkhead’s basic surveybook The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (1921).

35 To have assumed such a chain of influence would have been for Breton to mistakethe history in question – but what matters here is that he may have believed it to be so.Serendipity (finding something useful that you’re not looking for) and misunderstandingseem to have been small but important elements in the ‘motor’ that has driven chains ofcultural production in the West during the 20th century.


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An equally important part of the neo-gothic project was a similarly

ambitious set of moral precepts and ideas, which in time fed strongly into

and regenerated Lovecraft’s own beloved monarchist and conservative

tradition. Lovecraft thus lived with, and was in many ways actually a product

of , a potent living example of how the most sensational form of horrorliterature could in fairly short order come to fundamentally change the very

fabric of the constructed urban world and human ideas about how to live in

and apprehend that world. 37

So it seems to me that Lovecraft’s project, if such it can be called, had

somewhat similar impulses and ideas to that of Aragon 38 and the early

surrealists: the attempt to find a new way to act upon the world through

literature that would be as potent as the original gothic novel had so

obviously been; his attempt to reconcile secular reason with the yearning for

the supernatural and alien; the seeking of the unfamiliar in the familiar fabric

of the everyday urban world; the focus on uncovering the antique

contradictions in modernity and finding a ‘northwest passage’ between theancient and the modern; the emphasis on spatial atmospheres as links to the

sense of the uncanny; the strong belief in the incompleteness of man’s grasp

upon the real world; in the insistence on trying to speak the unspeakable

through a fresh and dynamic language that could break with the tired style of

the Victorian past; the attempt to develop new types of creative works that

arise from ‘bad’ and ‘vulgar’ commercial taste but which would transcend

those tastes.

The German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin later became fascinated by

the Paris arcades described by Aragon. 39 His famous ‘Arcades Project’

37 At the moment when Lovecraft was formulating “The Call of Cthulhu”, Hitler waspublishing his own ‘horror’ book, Mein Kampf - which would indeed change the world. The first volume of Mein Kampf appeared in July 1925.

38 Although it should be pointed out that at that time Aragon’s project was unfixed anddeveloping, as was Lovecraft’s.

39 Michael Calderbank. “Surreal Dreamscapes: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades”.Essay available for free online at surrealismcentre.ac.uk


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(1927-1940), as variously reconstructed and interpreted, has had a significant

effect on the creative-intellectual life of the 20th century. Benjamin could

almost be describing Lovecraft in New York in the following passage on the

nature of walking and discovering in the urban night…

“An intoxication comes over the one who walks aimlessly through

the streets for a long time. With every step the walking itself gains

greater power; the temptations of shops, bistros and smiling women

grow less and less, while more and more irresistible becomes the

magnetism of the next street corner, a distant mass of greenery, or

the name of a street. Then comes hunger. He wants to know

nothing of the hundred ways of satisfying it. Like an ascetic animal,he prowls through unknown neighborhoods until, in deepest

exhaustion, he collapses in his cold, displeasing room.” 40

Lovecraft writes of this “fever” in his letters…

“If these ancient spots were fascinating in the busy hours of twilight,

fancy their utter and poignant charm in the sinister hours before

dawn, when only cats, criminals, astronomers, and poetic

antiquarians roam the waking world! … truly we had cast the

modern and visible world aside” […] “the fever of the explorer was

upon us” 41

40 From a translation of the notes and materials for the Arcades Project, WalterBenjamin. Given in Joachim Schlor. Nights in the big city: Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930.Reaktion, 1998.

41 S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005.p.65-66.


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he ideas of the Surrealists found their way, more or less clearly, to the

members of the Situationist International who also engaged in some

highly influential night walks 42 they called dérives , in the later 1950s. One

assumes that the linkages between the 1920s night walks of the Paris

surrealists and those of the Paris Situationists are clear cut, via both directand indirect routes into several key 1950s European groups 43 that would lead

to the early Situationist International. The influence was no doubt wider and

took multiple routes. One such alternative route might be seen in the work

of the French philosopher Francois Dagognet who used the word “neo-

geographie” in the title of his Une Epistemologie del’space concret: Neo-

geographie . DeJean, translating part of what seems to be Dagognet’s still as- yet-untranslated book 44 , seems to define a neo-geographic practice as being

psychological in nature...

“a relational field [of] irradiations, numerous fragile paths,

proximities and distances, an ensemble that can be said to constitute

a personality” 45

This is typical French intellectual language, but: “field of irradiations” and“fragile paths” 46 that combine in what is presumably a very personal

psychological “ensemble” linked to the experience of a place.... some readers

may see here a similarity to the Lettrist /early Situationist practice of derive

as part of psychogeographic walking and writing. It seems likely that

Dagognet’s idea of neo-geography operated within the wake of Henri

Lefebvre’s influential book La production de l’espace (1974) — although even

there we might find a looping passage back to the early Surrealists, since

42 Guy Debord. Theory of the Derive (1958).

43 Sadie Plant. The Most Radical Gesture (1992). Routledge.

44 Dagognet, Francois (1977). Une epistemologie de l’espace concret: neo-geographie (Problemes

et controverses). Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.45 Ibid. p.91 - translation of p.174 of Dagognet.

46 Hakim Bey uses a similar terminology about the sense-of-place in his essay “AgainstInterpretation”.

T


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thinks he has escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no

corresponding expansion of his dream life. The reason is clear:

dreams spring from reality and are realised in it.” — Formulary for a

New Urbanism (1957).

The theory and practice of the dérive is central to the development of

psychogeography. 51 The dérive is predicated on the act of walking in the

city, and is usually semi-random but according to the SI…

“If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the

methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy.

… a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form” … “Chance is a less

important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive

point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant

currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into

or exit from certain zones.” — Theory of the Derive (1958)

The SI’s version of the dérive is not based upon a surrealist-style ‘surrender

to the unconscious’ (as in the old practice of automatic writing, etc), which

the SI and the surrealists alike quickly considered a failed technique. Unlike

Machen’s vision of walking, the SI dérive may include the study of maps —

although largely as the framework from which to build new and possibly

transient ones…

“The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and

calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of

maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological andpsychogeographical ones — along with their correction and

improvement. … With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and

experimental dérives , one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of

influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no

worse than that of the first navigational charts.” — Theory of the

Derive (1958)

51 For a full modern account see any number of books on psychogeography, the mostaccessible of which is Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography .


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Yet, like the surrealists, there was obviously an SI interest in the potential

of the relics of an occult past, if only for their liminal atmospheres and hair-

raising potential. For instance, among other activities, the SI Paris group is

described in Theory of the Derive (1958) as… “wandering in subterranean

catacombs forbidden to the public” — another aspect of their ideas that would have been familiar to both Lovecraft and Machen. In Debord’s essay

“The Adventure” (1960) he states that “The situationists are in the

catacombs of visible culture”. The literary gothic and science fiction are

clearly the twin metaphorical poles of the dérive . One of the founding

members of the Situationist International, Asger Jorn, once wrote…

“psychogeography is the science fiction of urbanism” 52

The practice of the dérive might then best be summarised as: the seeking out

of tenuous atmospheres, sediments of history, unfrequented routes, during

the semi-random pedestrian examination of urban streetscapes. Knowledge

gained from this activity can psychologically transform urban spaces, and

usefully reveal points of potential playful action. The idea of playful and

subversive action or intervention seems to me the key new element that the SI

brought to urban walking. Yet this was often expressed only in words,

provocational texts and the famous slogans of May 1968. And how different

were these really from Lovecraft’s own cosmicism, ‘imprinted’ via his stories

into places through being distributed to the youthful masses via the potent

means of the pulp magazines? And what of these Situationist phrases fromthe walls of Paris…?

“We see things only as we are constructed to see them”

“Penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism”

“In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life”

“Possibilities are even more hideous than realities”

52 Internationale Situationniste , 1958-1969, No.1 & 2. Editions Champ Libre, 1975.


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Actually these are all from H.P. Lovecraft. But they could so easily have

been passed off as SI slogans from the walls of Paris in 1968.

ovecraft also has a number of ideas in common with the much latermodern psychogeographers, the writers of what might be called the

‘London turn’ which flowered in the 1990s. There is the antiquarian

interest, which is an obviously similarity. But there are other similarities.

Stewart Home used the language and graphic crudity of the pulps in his

psychogeographic fictions. Other modern psychogeographers have a

traditionalist political bent like Lovecraft, such as Peter Ackroyd. Iain

Sinclair’s novels and other work takes inspiration from Machen, among

others. Like Ackroyd and Sinclair, Lovecraft understands places as being

layered with ‘eruptive’ traces of the past that can invade the present in various

forms 53 and that certain areas of cities often sustain their general ambiances

and trades despite the changing centuries and changing populations.

Ackroyd calls this ‘chronological resonance’…

“Yet perhaps it has become clear that certain activities seem to

belong to certain areas, or neighbourhoods, as if time were moved or

swayed by some unknown source of power.” 54

“Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can

materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who live

within them, is it not also possible that within our sensibility and our

language there are patterns of continuity and resemblances … ” 55

53 I discuss this aspect of Lovecraft’s work in my essay “The Rats In The Walls:otherness and British culture” in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context , 2010. WillEisner explores the same themes of unconscious continuance, with more grit andsocial/racial awareness, in his superb graphic novel of the biography of one New York

street, Dropsie Avenue. This may have been inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Street”.54 Peter Ackroyd, London, the biography . Chatto & Windus, 2000.

55 Peter Ackroyd, “On the Englishness of English Literature”. In: The Collection . Chatto& Windus, 2001.

L


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We might see such an ‘eruptive’ past emerging into horror fiction form in the

hideously metamorphosed American Indians in New York, in Lovecraft’s

short story “He” (1925), written in the hours after an intense all-night solo

walk in Manhattan. One can also see the idea fundamentally structuring his

earlier “The Rats In The Walls” (1923) where important structures are builtatop one other on the same site over the centuries and millennia. 56

Peter Ackroyd rightly points to the ways that the complex historical

pattern/patina of a city constrains the nature of what people can do and build

and how they might choose to think and act in certain places. A sound

historical awareness would certainly seem useful for the practice of

psychogeography, enabling one to identify what the hidden constrains andlong-term ties of a place are, in order to discern where it might offer real

opportunities for meaningful contemporary action and/or literary

transmutation. Such an approach has been derided by the more politically

minded, but it is perhaps a useful check against the increasingly antiquated

‘revolutionary’ urges of the Situationist-inspired psychogeographers, who in

their reverence for failed 20th century political projects seem to be just as

much in danger of becoming a species of antiquarian as those who operate in

the Machen / Lovecraft / Ackroyd line.

I hope this short essay has usefully outlined some intellectual strands that

might lead someone to say that Lovecraft deserves to be considered seriouslyas a proto-psychogeographer, alongside Machen, Aragon and others. In a

further essay in this volume I will outline some of Lovecraft’s actual walking

experiences and practices.

56 So far as I know, this then-heretical idea was first put forward in archaeologicalcircles in 1922 by Alfred Watkins’ Early British Trackways: Moats, Mounds, Camps and Sites .Possibly Lovecraft read a review of this seminal work. But it seems more likely that as ayouth Lovecraft may simply have read such ideas expertly anticipated in literature byRudyard Kipling in his series of linked fantasy / historical stories Puck of Pook’s Hill (1909) and its sequel Rewards and Fairies (1910). There are probably many other examplesin British supernatural literature.


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Dusk in New York City. Road leading to the Woolworths building, Sixth Avenue.

The building was then the tallest in New York, and indeed in the world. Lovecraft

went to the top of it on his first visit to New York in 1922. For an illustration of the

same view see the illustration given on page eight of my book.

From: The Lighting of New York, GEC. Public Domain.


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2 : H.P. LOVECRAFT’S NIGHT WALKS IN NEW YORK:

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES

his short account outlines 15 techniques that Lovecraft used on his

walks. Probably there were many more, but they were not recorded or

documented. Others may be able to discover more through reading his

fiction and essays.

Anticipation — pausing before entering, so as to previsualise in one’s mind

the scene one is about to see, and to bring imaginative elements to bear.

“Frank Belknap Long once recalled how, in their nocturnal strolls,

Lovecraft would pause before this shaded archway or that wanly

glowing fanlight and let his imagination [run riot, before entering]” 1

“…alluring shadows of archaic things things half of the imagination.

I paus’d and looked and then paus’d and looked again ——” 2

Ambiance sampling — moving between small areas in a restricted over an

entire day, synchronizing ones reading matter to each area.

For instance, Lovecraft read Arthur Machen’s theoretical book on aesthetics,

Hieroglyphics, in July 1925 in a curious manner…

“I read it through, moving to a fresh bower of beauty [in Prospect

Park] for each chapter” 3

Camera mind — Lovecraft’s impression of a place served as a kind of camera

1 Lewis Spence, Robert M. Price. The Shub-Niggurath cycle . Chaosium, 1994. p.201.


3 Ibid. p.158.

T


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Although Lovecraft seems to have owned two Kodak cameras, he thought of

it simply as a jobbing recording device. In many ways he simply did not need

a camera, since his amazing topographic faculties and memory served just as

well, if not better. He cultivated the faculty of ‘capturing’ a place.

Connected ambiances — rapid travel between places of similar ambiance.

Lovecraft was not averse to hopping rapidly between sites, by using New

York’s public transport system, thus weaving a tapestry of impressions of a

city that all draw from the same time period.

Drugs — use of stimulants before walking.

Lovecraft was in the company of heavy smokers in the meetings of the Kalem

Club, and the subsequent night-walks would thus see him thoroughly

infused with nicotine, especially potent because he was not himself a smoker.

He writes of buzzing with tobacco after meetings. 4 He was also infused with

the strong freshly-brewed New York coffee served at the gatherings.

Errance — the surrealist technique of map-less ‘openness to chance’.

Lovecraft is exploring without map and guide as early as August 1924. 5 At

the end of September 1925 he spends several days and evenings without a

map, exploring the furthest outer suburbs and boundaries of New York 6 …

“I had no map, & knew nothing of the country — trusting to chance

with a very agreeable sense of adventure into the unknown” 7

4

S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005. p.97. 5 Ibid. p.68.

6 Ibid. p.208.

7 Ibid. p.210.


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Multiple animal encounters — Lovecraft adored cats and made almost a

game of his very serious attempts to encounter as many street and garden cats

as possible on his walks. There were then a great many cats to encounter, as

his good friend Loveman commented...

“One of the quaintest features of all colonial New York is the

number of cats seen at large…” 8

One has to also presume that cats were far more numerous and venturesome

before the advent of the cat-massacring mass car-culture, drug-addled yobs,

and the local pest-control officer. 9 Lovecraft always had a supply of catnip

to help attract them. 10

Liggage — similar to gate-crashing a location, but done by a subterfuge.

“I hung around this place [I wanted to enter] like a thief planning a

large-scale cleanup [i.e.: burglary], but was finally rewarded when a

large party — evidently friends of the inhabitants — called and

strolled about the patio and arcade with the gate open !”11

Pre reading — to attune oneself to the anticipated weather on a walk. He

writes in the Autumn of 1925, of a strategy to get himself in the mood to

appreciate the changing weather…

“I think I will peruse some old fashion’d poet on the subject of

autumn” p.202


9 Lovecraft’s flat was infested with mice at one point, and he had to use traps to catchthem. Presumably the landlady would not allow him to bring a local cat to his room for

a few nights to clear them out.10 Letter by Lovecraft given on p.54 of Fritz Leiber and H.P. Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark, Wildside Press, 2005.

11 H.P. Lovecraft. Selected Letters: 1932-1934.


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Promenade — dressing up and promenading up and down a street engaged

in witty and intellectual conversation to see its effect on ordinary people.

See his fastidious attention to dress and the Sunday tradition of the Kalem

Club to promenade in best suits 12 and ‘dandy’ canes down Clinton Street.

Rheinhart Kleiner later gave a full published account of this tradition. 13

Rejection of ‘games’ — not adapting mundane games in a facile attempt to

‘enliven’ walking.

Lovecraft had written generally on games, in a 1932 letter to James F.

Morton, that…

“They reveal no actual secrets of the universe, and help not at all in

intensifying or preserving the tantalising moods and elusive dream-

vistas of the aesthetic imagination” 14

He is clearly talking here of either sports, or popular ‘amusements’ and

diversions such as the crossword-puzzles (then newly invented and in vogue),

silly ‘party’ games, or ‘travel’ games to ‘pass the time’ such as twentyquestions. Perhaps he also has in mind some occult type ‘games’, such as the

tarot and others. I do not think he is referring to what might be termed

‘playfulness in response to an environment’. Certainly, the quote alone is no

reason for claiming that Lovecraft cannot therefore have engaged in anything

like surrealist games on his night walks.

12 Lovecraft’s sartorial tastes and epic pursuit of the best suit at the lowest pricedeserve an essay all of their own. He put an enormous amount of effort into thepresentation of his public personality, but it was only in small details of dress that this was manifest. He refused to change the style of his suits to accommodate fashion, andfelt that sloppy dressing was heralding a new distinctly American style that would

presage the decline of the West. 13 S.T. Joshi. Lovecraft’s New York Circle . Hippocampus Press, 2006. p.225.

14 In: Penelope Rosemont. Surrealist women: an international anthology . Continuum, 1998.p.368.


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Transference of night imaginations to the daytime world — a way of forcing

the impressions gained on the radically-changed night streets back upon the

‘real’ world…

“What awesome images are suggested by the existence of such secret

cities within cities! … The active imagination conjures up endless

weird possibilities … having seen this thing, one cannot look an

ordinary crowded street without wondering what surviving marvels

may lurk unsuspecting beneath the prim and monotonous blocks.” 15

“It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with

darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-

afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis …” — H.P. Lovecraft,

“Cool Air” (New York, 1926).

Mania — allowing oneself to be worked up into a sort of fever-dream for the

past of the streets.

There were several times, though not in New York, when out-of-town visitors were given tours that lasted all day. On these Lovecraft enthusiasms

frequently amazed and exhausted his companions, with an urgent verbal and

arm-waving conveyance of ‘lost’ narratives, until they begged for the café, the

train station, or the subway entrance.

He writes in one of his letters…

“the fever of the explorer was upon us” 16

Some of his solo expeditions also indicate an amazing strength of will when

engaged in walking — to visit so many locales, all day and often into the

evening, on what seems to have been a very meager diet. Some friends

seriously feared for his health after seeing him on his return from such manic

all-day exertions. Such as Cook in 1932…


16 Ibid. p.65-66.


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“Folds of skin hanging from a skeleton. Eyes sunk in sockets like

burnt holes in a blanket. Those delicate, sensitive artists’s hands and

fingers nothing but claws. The man was dead except for his nerves,

on which he was functioning ...” 17

Placeability — fidelity in literary documentation of places, even if fictional

elements are used.

Lovecraft uses places in his fiction in such as way as the reader is made to

wholly believe in them. His paths and references can often still be followed

on the ground today. The surrealists did something similar…

“the textual inscription in novels such as Andre Breton’s Nadja or

Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant , often appears anchored to a reality

which we are led to believe took place and the writing frequently

possesses the instructive and at times banal specificities of a tour or

itinerary that might be literally as well as literarily followed.” 18

Taking fragments — and then somehow ‘meditating’ on them off site.

Lovecraft chipped a small piece off a Dutch gravestone in Flatbush in 1922.

Documents

Walking With Cthulhu 2011 Web