David J. Goodwin. Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023.
Reviewed by Peter C. Baldwin
The horror fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, which sends delightful chills down the spines of his many fans, draws its power from its monsters and creepy settings, not from human characters. Lovecraft’s florid prose lacks believable protagonists. The men – always men – who appear in his stories seem to have few emotions beyond curiosity, determination, and terror. Lovecraft excels at describing places of horror but not the experience of their inhabitants.
A beautifully crafted new study of three crucial years in Lovecraft’s life (1924, 1925, and 1926) delves into how his peculiar authorial vision and life experience were shaped by his only long foray outside his native Providence, Rhode Island. David J. Goodwin deftly unfolds Lovecraft’s attempt to make a place for himself as a writer in New York City. Unable to secure steady work, minimally productive in his writing, and dependent on the generosity of his wife, Lovecraft found life in Manhattan and Brooklyn to be one of constant poverty. Yet the three New York years were central to his development as an individual and as a writer, Goodwin shows. Though Lovecraft lived in Providence for most of his short life (1890-1937), New York had filled him with images, ideas, and a sense of validation from the company of fellow writers. His period of greatest creativity was the decade following his return to his beloved hometown.
While in New York, Lovecraft enjoyed the camaraderie of a group of struggling writers calling themselves the “Kalem Club.” Lovecraft’s friendships reveal him to be a much more socially engaged man than one might guess from his later public image as a recluse or his somber appearance in photographs. Accompanied often by these friends, he enjoyed exploring the city’s five boroughs, preferring to do so late at night when the streets were empty.
Lovecraft viewed the city through the lens of nostalgia for an imaginary past of Dutch burghers and refined Englishmen. He was nothing like the inquisitive flaneur described by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. “The crowd, the people of the city going about their adventures and routines, held little interest for him,” writes Goodwin. “The physical tissue of the city – its buildings, its parks, its places – drew his obsessive gaze. Signs and symbols of the urban past, not the intricate daily play of street life, fascinated him.”[1]
The human dramas and nocturnal energy of the city were unwelcome distractions in Lovecraft’s search for relics of the colonial past. Unimpressed by Greenwich Village as a hub of bohemian artistic life, he meandered through its dark streets and alleys searching for its “classic doorways,” antique gates, dormer windows, and evocative alleyways where he might imagine the spirit of old New York. In Milligan Place (a few blocks from Washington Square Park), “the hush of centuries was on the place.”[2] Here, without the horror, we can glimpse the explorer from his earlier short story, “The Nameless City,” who ventures into an ancient urban ruin that no other living man had seen.
It takes determined effort to see New York without seeing its people, even late at night. For Lovecraft, that effort seems to have been motivated at least in part by his contempt for the growing non-Anglo population of the metropolis: Blacks, Jews, Asians, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. “The emptiness and quiet of the night allowed Lovecraft to investigate and appreciate the city with an attention impossible in the daylight,” Goodwin observes. “The nocturnal atmosphere also enabled him to study its sites from an idealized and sanitized point of view. There were very few people – especially those deemed the wrong sort of people by Lovecraft – to disrupt his flight of fancy. While tabulating the `thousand charms’ of Minetta Street, he expressed relief that the neighborhood’s `Italian squalor was faded into shadow.’”[3]
Casual contempt for immigrants was common at this time among affluent Americans, including those like Lovecraft, who imagined themselves to be the cultured relics of a better day. Much of the initial impetus for choking off immigration in the early 1920s had come from Boston Brahmins in the Immigration Restriction League and their voice in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge. The pseudo-scientific writing of the New Yorker Madison Grant gave a veneer of intellectual respectability to the idea that Northern European “Nordics” were the superior race. Similar ideas were disseminated among the middle-and working-class by the new incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, which was at its peak of power in the Northern states when Lovecraft moved to the city.
Lovecraft’s loathing of Jews was nonetheless extreme, even in these years preceding the Holocaust. He expressed his horror of the “slithering human vermin” of the subways and his desire to “slaughter a score or two.”[4] Lovecraft would later voice admiration for Adolf Hitler as he rose to power in the 1930s, and would imagine the Führer “wip[ing] Greater New York clean with poison gas.”[5]
One of the oddest things about Lovecraft’s fixation on Jews is that he chose to marry one. Goodwin devotes considerable effort to puzzling out the relationship between Lovecraft and the beautiful, dark-eyed Sonia Greene, a Ukrainian immigrant whose first language was Yiddish. Widowed after a miserable marriage, Greene supported herself as a milliner (a person who makes or sells women’s hats) at a clothing store at the time she was introduced to Lovecraft on a 1921 visit to Boston. Lovecraft was apparently bowled over by her sparkling personality, flirtatious manner, and obvious intelligence. He gushed about her in letters to friends, then undercut his words with slurs against Slavs and Jews. Goodwin speculates that Lovecraft’s interest might have been piqued by what he perceived as Greene’s exoticism as well as by their shared interest in literature. Like many racists, Lovecraft was able to identify a few friends as exceptions to the general rule of their group’s inferiority. He had earlier written a backhanded letter of support for a fellow writer, whom he described as a genius, “Jew or not.”[6]
Greene could not help but notice Lovecraft’s bigotry because he couldn’t shut up about it even while courting her. His friends, meanwhile, were impressed by Lovecraft’s success in landing such a delightful partner. Lovecraft was not a man of religious faith (though in his fiction he used the word “blasphemous” almost compulsively to describe the hideousness of various monsters). He nonetheless made the tactless decision to marry Greene in St. Paul’s Chapel, an Episcopal church built in the colonial era. Then they caught a train for Philadelphia, where they spent part of their short honeymoon revising and typing one of Lovecraft’s manuscripts, a piece of ghostwriting for Harry Houdini.
Lovecraft had grown up accustomed to being cared for by women. After his father had died in an insane asylum of late-stage syphilis when the boy was eight years old, he was raised by his mother in the genteel home of his maternal grandparents on Providence’s East Side. The family’s wealth drastically declined, his grandfather died, and the teenage Lovecraft went into a depression. He dropped out of high school, jettisoned plans to attend Brown University, and lived with his mother in cramped lodgings until she, too, died in the insane asylum in 1919. Lovecraft, by that point, had established a marginally successful career as a writer, but relied on his aunts for housing and support until he moved to New York to marry Greene.
The marriage was troubled. Lovecraft was unwilling or unable to hold down a job beneath what he considered to be his elevated station as a literary man. He depended for his sustenance on Greene’s generosity and on occasional grudging stipends from his racist, disapproving aunts. He preferred the company of his friends in the Kalem Club to spending time with his wife.
In tracing the story of Lovecraft’s life in New York, Goodwin has benefitted from an extraordinarily large trove of personal letters. Lovecraft was a compulsive correspondent, producing as many as 100,000 postcards and letters over the course of his life, at least 10,000 of which survive. During his New York years, Lovecraft wrote constantly to his aunts in Providence, leaving behind a detailed record of daily life from which Goodwin could draw. Much of his later correspondence was with fellow writers, providing him with an epistolary community in place of the personal camaraderie he had enjoyed in New York.
Goodwin declares that his intent is not to be Lovecraft’s biographer but rather to “structure a thorough telling of his relationship with New York City. Readers will be invited to walk through its streets and neighborhoods with Lovecraft and experience them as they appeared in his thoughts and imagination.”[7] Indeed, Goodwin recounts many of these excursions, and notes Lovecraft’s use of them in his fiction. He even provides photographs of important locations visited by his subject.
Three short stories written in New York help Goodwin show how Lovecraft perceived the city, or at least how he could build literary horror from impressions formed on his walks. The narrator of “He” is obviously based on Lovecraft himself. In the first paragraph, he declares: “My coming to New York had been a mistake.” The poet narrator had hoped to find inspiration there, but is repelled by the population of “squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes.” As Goodwin summarizes, “Only late-night searches for winding alleys, red brick homes, and Georgian fanlights – all relics of the now lost, preindustrial, pastoral, and homogeneously Anglo-Dutch New York – preserve the narrator’s identity.” On a ramble through Greenwich Village, he encounters a mysterious gentleman with the clothing and diction of the colonial era. This antiquarian creature of the night leads the narrator through a labyrinth of alleys and tunnels before ending at his mansion, where he magically reveals views of the city’s colonial past, and of a hideous future metropolis infested by “yellow, squint-eyed people.”[8]
“`The Horror at Red Hook,’” Goodwin writes, “uniformly ranks as Lovecraft’s most problematic piece of fiction, and it represents his raw reaction to a city becoming unpalatable to his sensibilities.”[9] Lovecraft’s misanthropy and xenophobia reach a fevered intensity as he describes a “polyglot abyss” infested by Syrians, Italians, Spaniards, Blacks, and a devil-worshipping cult of Kurdish illegal immigrants who sacrifice and eat children from an adjacent Norwegian neighborhood. This Trumpian nightmare of foreign invaders features another supernatural figure from the past, an ancient Dutch New Yorker who is entangled in the cult yet also represents the persistence of some of the city’s past glories. The story shows Lovecraft’s careful attention to the built environment of a real neighborhood as well as his animosity toward its people.
“Cool Air,” Lovecraft’s final New York story, features another mysterious stranger, a Spanish doctor of “striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding,” who converses with the narrator about “memories of better days.”[10] This cultured gentleman, like Lovecraft himself, ekes out an existence of sorts in an apartment below his proper station in life. Goodwin, in discussing these three tales, carefully traces the elements of New York’s built environment on which its scenes were built.
In his book’s final full chapter, Goodwin sketches Lovecraft’s callous decision to divorce Greene and return to Providence. In leaving New York, he had left behind the only lover and the only circle of friends he would ever have, but he had regained a place he loved even more. “I am Providence!” he declared.[11] Thereafter, many of his stories featured fictional New England settings.
Goodwin is sympathetic toward his eccentric subject, but he retains the critical distance needed to explore Lovecraft’s bigotry and stunted human relationships. He asserts that the New York years Lovecraft considered a time of exile somehow unleashed his creative energies. Once back in his hometown, Lovecraft scribbled out five stories and two novellas in short order, including his popular, arguably central work, “The Call of Cthulhu.” A distillation of Lovecraftian themes, “Cthulhu” features manuscripts in strange languages, a cult composed of racial inferiors, a bit of commentary on Providence architecture, a horrific supernatural being, and an intrepid man of letters – Professor Angell, named for the street where Lovecraft was born.
Peter C. Baldwin, a former resident of Providence and habitué of Angell Street, is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930, among other works.
Featured image (at top): The Surrender of Nieuw Amsterdam in 1664. Print by Charles X. Harris, 1856-, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
[1] David J. Goodwin. Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023, 84-85.
[2] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 93.
[3] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 99-100.
[4] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 111, 156.
[5] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 172.
[6] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 35.
[7] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 15.
[8] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 142.
[9] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 138.
[10] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 161.
[11] Goodwin, Midnight Rambles, 171.
