Artículo 4A. Comentarios del Staff sin resolver
Artículo 9. Oferta y cotización
“I guess you won't wonder now why I have to steer clear of subways” — H.P. Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model”.
he first New York subway line had opened in 1904, effectively an extension of the sidewalks. The new system would quickly be characterised in the press as an antechamber of Hell 1 , in stark contrast to
the elegant and sublime visions of lofty beauty to be found at the grand city railroad stations such as the old Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central. Lovecraft had expressed anxiety at the thought of subways as early as 1920, as seen in the ominous manner in which people walk into the subway entrances in his dream-story “Nyarlathotep” (1920)…
“One [column of people] disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad.” — H.P. Lovecraft. “Nyarlathotep”.
This may reflect his own experience of the Boston subway system in the 1910s, or of reading news and commentary on it in the press. In New York in 1925 he has…
“… nightmares of strange underground caverns like the Boston subway” 2
Later he even appears to have feared the sight of the subway entrances, or at least has one of his narrators voice such a fear…
“I cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering.” — H.P. Lovecraft, “The Lurking Fear” (1922).
1 See my following essay on ghosts and monsters in the New York subway. 2 S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005. p.158.
“The Lurking Fear” was written after his first visit to New York, and may reflect his own experience there. Yet in his letters of 1922 he gives little indication he disliked using the subway. In 1924 and 1925 he expresses increasingly dislike of using them at certain times, but not fear. Nevertheless he may well have had several deep-seated concerns about his safety, since if he was prone to fainting then to fall down steep subway steps could be quite fatal. Or if he were to faint on the platform and fall onto the electrified rails. There was also the likely behavior of other travelers in an emergency to be considered. On 1st August 1918, when a then-new subway shuttle system
had opened in New York, there had apparently been a riot and stampede to get out of the station. This was before the installation of glowing guide-lines that led people out of the dark. 3 There had been other similar incidents in
the early years of the subway…
“Indescribable scenes of crowding and confusion, never paralleled in this city. […] a deadly, suffocating, rib-smashing subway rush which began at 7 o’clock tonight. Men fought, kicked and pummeled one another […] grey haired men pleaded for mercy, boys were knocked down and only escaped by a miracle from being trampled underfoot. The presence of the police alone averted what would undoubtedly have been panic after panic, with wholesale loss of life.” — New York
Tribune, 28th October 1904.
In the frenetic growth of the 1920s, rush-hour overcrowding might have made those sorts of scenes even more likely in Lovecraft’s mind. One commentator wrote that…
“Monster crowds live in Brooklyn, across the East river; monster crowds live in New Jersey, across the Hudson river” 4
Lovecraft echoes this rhetoric of the monstrous, when he described in his letters the crowd in the pre-Christmas crush of December 1924 as…
3 Meyer Berger and Pete Hamill. Meyer Berger’s New York. Fordham University Press, 2004. p.102.
“rushing and slithering human vermin” 5
He cannot have been much encouraged to find out that the ventilation in the subways still left much to be desired, even in the mid 1920s…
“It is disappointing to hear that travellers on the New York Subway are complaining of imperfect ventilation and other discomforts which were not anticipated” — The Electrician journal, 1925. In his letters Lovecraft refers to some types of closed New York buses as “prepayment suffocation chambers” 6 , so how much more trepidation might
he have felt about suffocation on the subways? 7
In February 1926 Lewis Mumford’s essay on the nature of the city highlighted the disquietingly humid and tactile nature of the overcrowded subways, while citing them as a sure and certain symbol of the decay of urban life in the city. Mumford strongly suggests that the subways were then places of deep discomfort and misery, using phrases such as…
“The Swedish Massage of the Subway” […] “the pulping mill of the subway” 8
Lovecraft may have been being irrational on the basic probabilities of stampede or suffocation while travelling, but nevertheless his trepidations were clearly shared by others. It was obviously unpleasant but he tolerated it in 1922, 1924 and well into 1925. Something changes around late 1925 / early 1926. His fear has its most vivid depiction in the gruesome canvas painted in his story “Pickman’s Model” (written September 1926)…
5 S.T. Joshi. (Ed.) The Lovecraft Letters: Letters from New York. Night Shade, 2005. p.101. 6 Ibid. p.158.
7 Lovecraft may have been encouraged to worry about entombment and suffocation when his own building had been shaken by a minor earthquake in late February 1925. This was followed by Pickwick Club collapse disaster, in nearby Boston (New England) in July 1925. The collapse killed 44 people. Lovecraft’s New York stories “The Horror at Red Hook” (written 1st-2nd August 1925) and “He” (written 11th Aug 1925) both culminate in calamitous and severe building collapse. Similarly, “In the Vault” (18th Sept 1925) features a man trapped in a building.
8 Lewis Mumford. “The Intolerable City”. Harper’s magazine issue 212 (Feb 1926), pp.283-93.
Still from Manhandled, a 1924 Gloria Swanson movie, showing the over-crowding of the New York subway system.
Picture: Public Domain.
“There was a study called ‘Subway Accident’, in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform.” — “Pickman’s Model”.
Following Pickman’s disappearance, the narrator refuses to venture into the subway system…
“If I don’t like that damned subway, it’s my own business” — “Pickman’s Model”.
There are some obvious explanations, such as his growing dislike of being in very close proximity to unassimilated immigrants. Yet other factors may have been at play. Medical doctors much later became aware of a fainting sickness brought on by a sudden blood pressure drop while travelling the subway…
“there is an actual sickness that affects mass-transit users […]
overcrowding leaves people wedged in place with blood accumulating in their feet, leading to faintness […] the claustrophobia and dreads combine to push people from unease to panic.” 9
Lovecraft had suffered from feeling faint and fainting in the years before he came to New York. Lack of a breakfast is apparently often a contributing factor to subway sickness, and Lovecraft was often very badly nourished in the second half of his stay in the city. Possibly this poor and irregular diet may help to partly account for his change in attitude to using the subway? Finally, I wonder if it is just possible that Lovecraft somehow associated the system with the horrors of socialism? 10 Everyone paid the same fare,
there were no “first class” tickets, no separate entrances or seating areas.
9 Christopher Norwood. “The Subway Syndrome”. New York Magazine, 9th August 1982.
10 I’m reliably informed that it is still common for new public transport proposals in the USA to have to overcome a basic assumption by politicians that the system would somehow be a ‘vanguard of socialism’.
Everyone was dragged down to the same level in the same mundane and deeply uncomfortable ‘cattle car’ experience. This would have been in stark contrast to the experience of the railways with their class-based ticketing structure and their palatial and uplifting stations. I know of no evidence for his ever making the comparison in writing, however. Yet there was at this time a more ideological than practical/biological set of structuring
assumptions about the mass urban crowd, an implicitly conservative one, and it may have fed into an implicit distrust of public transport. 11
I refer to the rise of the popular idea of the ‘mob mind’, those urban masses who act in a semi-hypnotised manner. The “mob mind” was a popular concept and talking point around 1919-1920, and relates more to the ideological dangers of crowds than to the everyday and very real dangers of crowded and ill-educated cities 12 although there is some overlap.
E.A. Ross’s best-selling book Social Control (1901) had suggested that people were increasingly subject to a primitive “suggestibility” in crowded modern cities. Partly this had to do with the rise of and change in the nature of advertising and shop window displays, partly with the rise of a violent and agitational leftist politics, but in America it was able to build on thinking about the nature of the new modern urban crowd and its patterns of behavior that had arisen in France after the French revolution — but which then had later become linked explicitly to racialised and race-thinking ideas of the type
11 One can see this attitude in the British upper classes even in the 1980s, when Loelia Ponsonby, one of the wives of 2nd Duke of Westminster said: “Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life”. She was apparently quoting the 1930s poet Brian Howard. The leftists in the press were quick to falsely attribute the quote to Mrs Thatcher, then leader of the Conservative Party.
12 For a full intellectual history of the idea and reality of the mob see J. S. McClelland’s The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti. Taylor & Francis, 2010. For the history in America see Paul S. Boyer. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920. Harvard University Press, 1992. For an intellectual history in Britain, see John Carey. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939. Faber and Faber, 1992.
then very common, as intellectuals tried to divine what sort of new politics might come out of the new modern crowds. 13
The neo-gothic architecture of a New York subway entrance. Picture: Library of Congress.
13 On the specific ‘hypnotic’ nature of urban crowds, which seems relevant to the columns of semi-hypnotised people in the Lovecraft story “Nyarlathotep” (1920) and to the news reports of subway stampedes, one might also point to Gustave le Bon’s earlier The Crowd (published in America in 1896) which had argued that an individual who is too long in a crowd... “finds himself in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer”.
In 1919 Ross’s student Robert Gault had published The Psychology of
Suggestion, drawing heavily on Ross’s ideas and the concept of the mob mind,
and this was no doubt reviewed in the sort of publications Lovecraft would have read such as Scientific American and Popular Science Monthly. I expect that the race riots, leftist parcel-bomb attacks 14 , and the serious political
unrest in 1919 gave Gault’s book a wide readership on publication.
Then on 9th September 1919 the whole of the Boston police force deserted
their posts, leaving the city virtually defenceless 15 , leading to further strong
cultural anxieties about Bolshevism (then a common name for communist socialism) — this time much closer to Lovecraft’s own Providence — and conflating politicised trades unions and crime in the public mind. These anxieties were set against the background of the terror of the Russian Revolution and its international spreading of the Bolshevist creed, and of recent race riots. 16 In the following years there occurred the major terrorist
bomb attack on New York on 16th September 1920, in which an old trolley
car (tram) had been used as the delivery vehicle. 17
All these fears must have contributed to the anxieties associated with using mass public transport. By the time Lovecraft arrived to live in New York in 1924, these wider anxieties appear to have quieted down somewhat, possibly aided by the mass deportation of anarchist and communist immigrants and heighted vigilance. Nevertheless such anxieties had undoubtedly left their mark on the psyches of ordinary people.
14 Which had been going on since 1914, see Trevor Conan Kearns, Jennifer L. Weber. Key Concepts in American History: Terrorism. Chelsea House, 2010. p.67.
15 Francis Russell. A City in Terror: Calvin Coolidge and the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Houghton Mifflin, 2005. The event partly inspired Lovecraft’s story “The Street”. 16 On the links between ‘the mob crowd’ and the race riots in 1919 and the years following, see: Jan Voogd. Race riots and resistance: the Red Summer of 1919. Peter Lang, 2008.
17 Beverly Gage. The day Wall Street exploded: a story of America in its first age of terror. Oxford University Press, 2010.