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he American writer Henry James, when looking at the New York skyline in 1904, wrote of the monstrous. But he felt powerless in its presence…

“The monstrous phenomena themselves [had] got the start, got ahead of, in proper parlance, any possibility of poetic, of dramatic capture” 1

The task may have been beyond James 2 _{, but it was not beyond Lovecraft. I}

believe I can strongly suggest that Lovecraft transmuted New York into the great evil city of R’lyeh, sunk beneath the waves, the eon-slimed lurking place of tentacled Cthulhu.

By 1925 New York was a city of over 1,000 towering skyscrapers, and the foundations of 30 more were being laid. Beneath these “monsters” (as they were sometimes called at the time 3 _{), many wreaths of smoke constantly}

curled between the buildings and into the sky like so many tentacles. 4 _This

great crucible of modernity was plunged into darkness by a total eclipse of the sun in January 1925. Some 10 million people in New York and New

England saw the eclipse on that day. Lovecraft recalled the eclipse in a letter of 1932…

1 _{Henry James. The American Scene, 1906.}

2 _{A writer who was once so sniffy about Lovecraft’s writing style. See: S.T. Joshi. I} Am Providence. Hippocampus Press, 2011.

3 _{Major Henry Curran, counsel of the City Club of New York, denounced the}

buildings as “monsters” and their spread as a “plague.” David Ward, Olivier Zunz. The Landscape of Modernity: essays on New York City, 1900-1940. Russell Sage Foundation , 1992. p.64.

4 _{See the New York paintings of Tavik Frantisek Simon (1877-1942)}

“In 1925 (when I was in New York) some of us tramped up into the cold of northern Yonkers to see the January eclipse” 5

Le Sprague de Camp elaborated…

“On January 24, 1925, he went with Morton, Leeds, Kirk, and Ernest Dench of the Blue Pencil Club to Yonkers, to see a total eclipse of the sun, beginning at 9:12 am. They had a fine view of the corona,” 6

I presume that de Camp could be so specific because he was using either the letters or Lovecraft’s detailed 1925 diary. The view of the eclipse was excellent from Yonkers, and indeed The Review of Popular Astronomy had given the advice that city observers…

“will find more desirable observation points at Yonkers, Newburgh or Poughkeepsie” 7

According to George Kirk’s letters, they found an aqueduct that they climbed to raise them quite high 8 _{so they would have seen an even better}

view of the city than others. There was snow on the ground, and Lovecraft later recalled the cold of that occasion as a… “marrow-congealing ordeal” 9 _,

since he really was not used to being out in cold weather and certainly not used to standing around in it on an aqueduct. He feared fainting in such weather, and rarely liked to go out in such cold weather. 10

An eclipse was portentous for Lovecraft, although in a scientific and not in a superstitious manner. In 1919 and 1923 eclipse observations had

confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity. Lovecraft had drawn what S.T. Joshi calls…

5 _{H.P. Lovecraft. Selected Letters: 1932-1934.} 6 _{Le Sprague de Camp. Lovecraft: a biography, 1975.} 7 _{The Review of Popular Astronomy, 1925.}

8 _{Letter given in Lovecraft’s New York Circle: The Kalem Club, 1924-1927. Hippocampus,} 2006.

9 _{H.P. Lovecraft. Selected Letters: 1932-1934.}

“wild conclusions from Einstein, both metaphysical and ethical, [that] are entirely unfounded” 11

… and he did not come to a real understanding of Einstein until 1929. At the time of the eclipse he seemed to believe that Einsteinian science had somehow proved that…

“All is chance, accident, and ephemeral illusion […] There are no values in all infinity — the least idea that there is [to be regarded as] the supreme mockery of all. All the cosmos is a jest, and fit to be treated only as a jest, and one thing is as true as another.” 12

The eclipse would thus have had more than astronomical meaning to Lovecraft. It was a portent of doom, one seemingly inextricably linked in his mind with the cultural relativism he endured in the melting pot of New York City. Both, in his mind, foretold the doom of the West.

Cover of the New York Evening News, 24th _{January 1925.}

11 _{S.T. Joshi. A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his time. Liverpool University} Press, 2001. p.183.

12 _{S.T. Joshi. A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in his time. Liverpool University} Press, 2001. Letter given on p.182.

As an amateur astronomer, albeit one not involved in theoretical matters due to has inadequate mathematical skills, Lovecraft had responded well to the spectral light of eclipses on other warmer occasions such as the eclipse of August 1932 August, and described them vividly…

“When the crescent waned to extreme thinness, the scene grew strange and spectral—an almost deathlike quality inhering in the sickly yellowish light. Just about that time the sun went under a cloud, and our expedition commenced cursing in 33-1/3 different languages including Ido. At last, though, the thin thread of the pre- totality glitter emerged into a large patch of absolutely clear sky. The outspread valleys faded into unnatural night—Jupiter came out in the deep-violet heavens—ghoulish shadow-bands raced along the winding white clouds—the last beaded strip of glitter vanished—and the pale corona flicker’d into aureolar radiance around the black disc of the obscuring moon. […] Finally the beaded crescent reëmerged, the valleys glow’d again in faint, eerie light, and the various partial phases were repeated in reverse order. The marvel was over, and accustom’d things resum’d their wonted sway.” 13

We might thus similarly imagine Lovecraft in January 1925 looking across at the city’s towering black monolith-like skyscrapers, from the height of a raised aqueduct, and seeing New York as if it were a sunken city risen from the bottom of the ocean, with semi-darkness all around and the brightest stars shining suddenly above. It is also possible Lovecraft may have later seen newsreel cinema footage and quality magazine pictures in National

Geographic, of New York during the eclipse, which could have contributed to

his ideas about the visual descriptions of R’lyeh. A year later he would write of…

“The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the

spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right.” — “The Call of Cthulhu”.

“ … he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.” — “The Call of Cthulhu”. The connection between his eclipse viewing of New York and his portrayal of R’lyeh seems clear, even if it did not immediately occur to Lovecraft. 14 _In

this case, the full writing of “The Call of Cthulhu” took place in the summer of 1926.

There had been an earlier 1922 vision of New York, as a wonderful land of faery towers, but even here are to be found two R’lyeh–like elements. They are found in his 1922 letter giving his visionary experience of the cityscape at sunset in the company of Samuel Loveman 15 _{…“Out of the water is rose at}

twilight …” Here is a clear foreshowing of New York as a sunken city, one that rises. The same passage in the letter also compares it to an undersea coral city… “… the loveliness that is coral, branching and glorious …” By 1925 Lovecaft’s experience of the city had soured and he saw only a much darker vision of a ‘dead city’. This was potently expressed in a night vision in the August 1925 short story “He” which was set in New York…

“I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before — the unwhisperable secret of secrets — the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.” — H.P. Lovecaft, “He”.

14 _{Locations often took about a year to find their way into his fiction.}

15 _{For the letter see S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night} Shade, 2005. pp.9-10.

Later in the same story, he animates it in a further vision of the future New York. The city is again given in terms that make it seem like a prototype for R’lyeh…

“I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious

pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “He” (1925).

The reference to the moon and the lights give this as a night scene, akin to his own eclipse vision of New York.

Such a vision of hellish, semi-destroyed New York may have been somewhat foreshadowed in Lovecraft’s mind by two post-apocalyptic New York novels. One was the journalist Garrett P. Serviss’s The Second Deluge (serialized 1911, book form 1912) in which an undersea New York is vividly explored. The other was The Vacant World (1912) by George Allan England.

16 _{Here is an extract from the latter’s very early stages…}

“Out over the incredible mausoleum of civilization they peered. Now and again they fortified their vision by recourse to the telescope. Nowhere, as he had said, was any slightest sign of life to be discerned. Nowhere a thread of smoke arose; nowhere a sound echoed upward. Dead lay the city, between its rivers, whereon now no sail glinted in the sunlight, no tug puffed vehemently with plumy jets of steam, no liner idled at anchor or nosed its slow course out to sea. The Jersey shore, the Palisades, the Bronx and Long Island all lay buried in dense forests of conifers and oak, with only here and there some skeleton mockery of a steel structure jutting through. The islands in the harbor, too, were thickly overgrown. On Ellis, no sign of the immigrant station remained. Castle William was quite gone. And with a gasp of dismay and pain, Beatrice pointed out the fact

16 _{For a full bibliography of such works see Roberta Scott and Jon Thiem.} “Catastrophe Fiction, 1870-1914: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Works in English”. Extrapolation 24:2, Summer 1983. For a selection regarding London see my own anthology, London Reimagined: an Anthology of Visions of the Future City (2010).

that no longer Liberty held her bronze torch aloft. Save for a black, misshapen mass protruding through the tree-tops, the huge gift of France was no more. Fringing the water-front, all the way round, the mournful remains of the docks and piers lay in a mere sodden jumble of decay, with an occasional hulk sunk alongside. Even over these wrecks of liners, vegetation was growing rank and green. All the wooden ships, barges and schooners had utterly vanished. […] Far out she gazed. The sun, declining, shot a broad glory all across the sky. Purple and gold and crimson lay the light-bands over the breast of the Hudson. Dark blue the shadows streamed across the ruined city with its crowding forests, its blank-staring windows and sagging walls, its thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had crumbled down—the city where once the tides of human life had ebbed and flowed, roaring resistlessly. High overhead drifted a few rosy clouds, part of that changeless nature which alone did not repel or mystify these two beleaguered waifs, these chance survivors, this man, this woman, left alone together by the hand of fate.”

This is vivid, but sadly it is only one bright glimpse at the start of an otherwise rather tediously stilted and dialogue-heavy novel, which forms the first of a ponderous trilogy. The trilogy very quickly falls back on the then- conventional civilization-vs-savages approach that fitted with the socialist- Aryanist race-regeneration views of the time. The novel The Vacant World is certainly a curiosity as a rare instance of the British post-apocalyptic disaster novel transferred to New York, but it hardly seems like an inspiration for Lovecraft.

Far more interesting in this regard is The Second Deluge (1911), especially in relation to Lovecraft’s conception of New York as the undersea of R’lyeh presided over by Cthulhu. The novel takes a very long time to get to New York, but the city is eventually depicted near the end in Chapter 25: “New York in Her Ocean Tomb” when it is viewed from a large diving bell. We

are then given an extended picture of an undersea New York brooded over by an alien and unspeakable monstrosity…

“They began with the skeleton tower itself, which had only once or twice been exceeded in height by the famous structures of the era of skyscrapers. In some places they found the granite skin yet in situ, but almost everywhere it had been stripped off, probably by the tremendous waves which swept over it as the flood attained its first thousand feet of elevation. They saw no living forms, except a few curiously shaped phosphorescent creatures of no great size, which scurried away out of the beam of the search-light. They saw no trace of the millions of their fellow-beings who had been swallowed up in this vast grave, and for this all secretly gave thanks. The soil of Madison Square had evidently been washed away, for no signs of the trees which had once shaded it were seen, and a reddish ooze had begun to collect upon the exposed rocks. All around were the shattered ruins of other great buildings, some, like the Metropolitan tower, yet retaining their steel skeletons, others tumbled down, and lying half-buried in the ooze.

Finding nothing of great interest in this neighborhood they turned the course of the bell northward, passing everywhere over

interminable ruins, and as soon as they began to skirt the ridge of Morningside Heights the huge form of the cathedral of St. John fell within the circle of projected light. It was unroofed, and some of the walls had fallen, but some of the immense arches yet retained their upright position. Here, for the first time, they encountered the real giants of the submarine depths. De Beauxchamps, who had seen some of these creatures during his visit to Paris in the Jules Verne, declared that nothing which he had seen there was so terrifying as what they now beheld. One creature, which seemed to be the unresisted master of this kingdom of phosphorescent life, appears to have exceeded in strangeness the utmost descriptive powers of all those who looked upon it, for their written accounts are filled with

ejaculations, and are more or less inconsistent with one another. The reader gathers from them, however, the general impression that it made upon their astonished minds.

The creatures were of a livid hue, and had the form of a globe, as large as the bell itself, with a valvular opening on one side which was evidently a mouth, surrounded with a circle of eyelike disks,

projecting shafts of self-evolved light into the water. They moved about with surprising ease, rising and sinking at will, sometimes rolling along the curve of an arch, emitting flashes of green fire, and occasionally darting across the intervening spaces in pursuit of their prey, which consisted of smaller prosphorescent animals that fled in the utmost consternation. When the adventurers in the bell saw one of the globular monsters seize its victim they were filled with horror. It had driven its prey into a corner of the wrecked choir, and

suddenly it flattened itself like a rubber bulb pressed against the wall, completely covering the creature that was to be devoured, although the effect of its struggles could be perceived; and then, to the amazement of the onlookers, the living globe slowly turned itself inside out, engulfing the victim in the process.”

[…] “no sooner had the tragic spectacle which they had witnessed been finished than they suddenly found the bell surrounded by a crowd of the globe-shaped creatures, jostling one another, and flattening themselves against its metallic walls. They pushed the bell about, rolling themselves all over it, and apparently finding nothing terrifying in the searchlight, which was hardly brighter than the phosphorescent gleams which shot from their own luminescent organs. One of them got one of its luminous disks exactly in the field of a magnifying window, and King Richard, who happened to have his eye in the focus, started back with a cry of alarm.

“I cannot describe what I saw,” the king wrote in his notebook. “It was a glimpse of fiery cones, triangles, and circles, ranged in tier behind tier with a piercing eye in the center, and the light that came

from them resembled nothing that I have ever seen. It seemed to be a living emanation, and almost paralyzed me.”

[…] “Avoiding the neighborhood of the cathedral, they steered the bell down the former course of the Hudson, but afterward ventured once more over the drowned city until they arrived at the site of the great station of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which they found completely unroofed. They sank the bell into the vast space where the tunnels entered from underneath the old river bed, and again they had a startling experience. Something huge, elongated, and spotted, and provided with expanding claw-like limbs, slowly withdrew as their light streamed upon the reddish ooze covering the great floor. The nondescript retreated backward into the mouth of a tunnel. They endeavored, cautiously, to follow it, turning a

magnifying window in its direction, and obtaining a startling view of glaring eyes, but the creature hastened its retreat, and the last glimpse they had was of a grotesque head, which threw out piercing rays of green fire as it passed deeper into the tunnel.”

[…] “they were almost frozen into statues. Close beside the bell, which had, during the struggle, floated near to the principal heap of mingled treasure and ruin, heavily squatted on the very summit of the pile, was such a creature as no words could depict—of a ghastly color, bulky and malformed, furnished with three burning eyes that turned now green, now red with lambent flame, and great shapeless limbs, which it uplifted one after the other […] They were terror- stricken now, and pushing the propellers to their utmost, they fled toward the site of the Metropolitan tower. On their way, although for a time they passed over the course of the East River, they saw no signs of the great bridges except the partly demolished but yet