HPL in "Brown Alumni Magazine"

[rkukan]

A short article about HPL's early astronomical activities, with an interesting (and tantalizing) glimpse of the cover illustration for his "Monthly Almanack" (Feb. 1904).

Brown Alumni Magazine - Star Gazer

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

A fantastic glimpse. I assume Joshi will eventually find someone to publish a collection of these materials too, if it has not already been done. There are collections of material from his amateur press writings including his own magazine, 'The Conservative' but I am not sure if his juvenilia has been collected and published in any form yet.

 

[j d worthington]

Someone like Martin Andersson or Phillip Ellis (Ningauble and ghyle of Chrons, respectively) would know more about this than I, as they are themselves Lovecraftian scholars; but, to the best of my knowledge, such is unlikely to happen any time soon. According to Joshi's note on volume 3 of the Collected Essays (which brings together HPL's writings on science):

For a variety of reasons it has proven impracticable to reproduce some of Lovecraft's unpublished juvenile scientific works. These include the following (all are found in the H. P. Lovecraft Papers at the John Hay Library, Brown University):

The Art of Fusion, Melting, Pudling & Casting (1899?)
Chemistry (1899?; 4 vols.)
A Good Anaesthetic (1899?)
The Railroad Review (December 1901)
The Scientific Gazette (1903-04; 32 issues)
Astronomy: The Monthly Almanack (1903-04; 9 issues)
The Planet (29 August 1903)
The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy (1903-09; 69 issues)
Annals of the Providence Observatory (1904)
Providence Observatory Forecast (5 April 1904)
The Science Library (1904?; 3 vols.)

Publication of these works would require costly and difficult reproduction in facsimile to capture the full flavour of the originals; in some cases, such reproduction would itself be problematic because of the faded and otherwise damaged condition of the originals. It is hoped, nonetheless, that publication of this sort might at some future date be deemed feasible.

However, that volume does include a fair number of his juvenile works, such as "My Opinions on the Lunar Canals" (1903?), No Transit of Mars (3 June 1906), Trans-Neptunian Planets (25 August 1906); The Moon (rev. 24 July 1906); etc., in at least one case with the original illustrations; as well as his various astronomical columns for papers such as the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner (1906-1908; only those for 1906 are, apparently, still extant), The [Providence] Tribune, The [Providence] Evening News, and so forth -- and these also include the original (hand-drawn) illustrations.

While not for everyone, for those interested in the minutiae of Lovecraft's life and work, these essays have a wealth of fascinating material. You can, for instance, see his early proposal of his cosmic viewpoint in "The Fixed Stars" (PVG, 7 December 1906), or possible influences on his development of "Polaris" in his controversy with astronomer J. F. Hartmann -- just as other volumes in the series also indicate possible sparks for various of his works.

All that aside, thank you very much, rkukan, for bringing this in. As one thoroughly fascinated by even the most minuscule aspect of Lovecraftian scholarship, I certainly appreciate having this added to my store....

 

[J-WO]

Nice drawing/ hectograph for a 13 year old, too. You can see where HPL's visual quality in his writing comes from. Anyone know if any more pictures by him (especially as an adult) have survived?

 

[j d worthington]

He did have some in his letters; those are often reproduced in the respective letters volumes (of which there are several now). There was also one painting which he did, which went on sale on ebay a year or two ago for quite a nice sum; that is reproduced as the cover for an issue of Lovecraft Studies....

 

[Ningauble]

He did have some in his letters; those are often reproduced in the respective letters volumes (of which there are several now). There was also one painting which he did, which went on sale on ebay a year or two ago for quite a nice sum; that is reproduced as the cover for an issue of Lovecraft Studies....

Yes, and then there was a watercolour painting that I think Chris Perridas had in his blog not too long ago, depicting beloved 454 Angell Street. I saved a jpg of that one, but not the one that you are referring to.

 

[Ningauble]

A fantastic glimpse. I assume Joshi will eventually find someone to publish a collection of these materials too, if it has not already been done. There are collections of material from his amateur press writings including his own magazine, 'The Conservative' but I am not sure if his juvenilia has been collected and published in any form yet.

What j.d. said. By now, everything except his letters (and those difficult-to-reproduce juvenilia that j.d. mentioned) is available in its entirety.
I am currently making my way through all of HPL's works in chronological order, and I've reached only 1906 so far. The list that I follow has more than 900 items on it.

 

[j d worthington]

That reminds me -- I still haven't got the final form of the current material in order, I'm afraid. Over the past 6 months things in my life rather blew up in my face, and I've had little time to devote to such things. So my apologies for still not getting this to you, Martin.

I am, however, doing the same, having reached May of 1919 with his works... and am finding an awful lot of unexpected connections there. One I just mentioned to Joshi as a possible influence on his handling of Joe Slater in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is his review of Eleanor B. Campbell's tale "The Loafer", from the March 1919 Corona. His phrasing there rather forcibly struck me as being very close to the approach to that character, and the tale was written at approximately the same time he did the review. Whether something will come to light to refute my supposition or not remains to be seen (it is certainly possible), but for the time being I can't help but feel that this -- along with his own "Brotherhood" of 1916 (written tongue-in-cheek but taken seriously by colleagues in the amateur movement, from what I gather from his correspondence with Kleiner) -- may well have influenced this aspect of the tale.

Of course, I have also been delayed in such reading by including various works which he is known to have read and which may (or openly did) influence him, often inserting them at the point where he either first encountered or first mentioned having read them -- both classic literature (genuine classical or classic English and American) and much from the pulps, as well as what I've been able to find by his amateur colleagues (some of whom were actually very good indeed, and many of whom are fascinating individuals in their own right). Add to that mix my going through (in order mentioned) the whole of those works he discusses in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", as well as much ancillary material, and... well, there you have it.

One thing which quickly strikes anyone reading Lovecraft in such a fashion is the consistency and coherence of his worldview -- how well-thought-out it is in so many respects; how articulate he was about even the minutest aspects of it. The more I read these things, the deeper my appreciation for all of his work (as well as the man himself) grows, and the more fascinating he becomes both as an individual and an artist. It is no wonder that his fiction can be revisited so often with ever-developing new layers on which to enjoy and appreciate it, as there is an enormous amount of thought behind even the most casual seeming note, reference, allusion, or phrasing in so much of it; things which have deep roots in a well-established and thought-provoking Weltanschauung such as one seldom encounters in modern literature.