H.P. Lovecraft, considered by many the father of modern horror fiction, is also very much a local legend. While the Rhode Island native famously said, “I am Providence,” Massachusetts also played a big part in his life and work. Of course, our state is home to the fictional Miskatonic River and the town of Arkham, which was appropriated by DC Comics as home of the asylum that housed the Joker, reaching a whole new level in popular culture. And that is really only scratching the surface of the surface.
Historian, writer and horror enthusiast David Goudsward joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath — just in time for spooky season — to take a deep dive in his book, “H.P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley.” What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I mean, maybe for Lovecraft, I shouldn’t say spooky, perhaps, maybe uncanny or preternatural.
David Goudsward: It’s sort of an odd categorization, no matter which word you choose. Technically, his material qualifies as science fiction today.
Rath: Well, let’s start off with one that kind of fits that category, because this is what got me so excited. Dave, When I was 17, I read this story “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and it totally blew my mind and scared the hell out of me. So I was so excited to read about Newburyport providing some some inspiration. Tell us about the Newburyport that Lovecraft experienced.
Goudsward: Lovecraft absolutely loved Newburyport. He would visit it on every single occasion he could. If he was visiting Portsmouth, another town he loved, he would always stop in Newburyport. If he was going to Haverhill to see his amateur press buddy Tryout Smith, he would stop in Newburyport.
But Newburyport had a dichotomy for Lovecraft. He loved the Georgian buildings and the well-kept lawns and the scenic waterways. But then you cross to the other side of the street and you have the clam shacks on the Joppa Flats. You have dirt roads. You have no sidewalks. And that dichotomy is what created the story.
“Shadows over Innsmouth” is actually set in Newburyport. He visits the library, he stays at the YMCA. He learns about this town he’s never heard of — which for an antiquarian is simply not done — and decides to go visit the part of Newburyport he didn’t like. The shanties, the dirt roads, the decrepit poverty that became a separate village. That became the blighted villas of Innsmouth, which is a little further down the road. It’s actually probably closer to somewhere around Ipswich. But again with Lovecraft, he gets on the bus. He describes going past Plum Island. He describes driving through Newbury. Half of his fiction has little travelogs buried in as well. And Newburyport is probably one of the best examples because you’ve got both sides of the coin in one town.
Rath: And we know, of course, that Lovecraft was pretty famously classist and racist, and that sort of brought everything together there in that one town.
Goudsward: Yeah. The problem with Lovecraft is that he was — and I’m not going to apologize for his racism. He was a racist. He was a spectacular racist. But he was raised by people from a previous generation, so there’s a certain mindset he adopts. But then you look at where he was publishing, such as Weird Tales, and he’s not so bad by comparison with what was out there. He tended to be a little more genteel in his writing than in his letters. And that’s a whole different ball of wax.
Rath: When we’re talking about Lovecraft in Massachusetts, we have to talk about Haverhill. And to keep this fun, let’s connected with another story, “The Shadow Out of Time,” considered by some Lovecraft’s greatest. And your book is really fascinating and learning about this. He could get some inspiration, for instance, from names from the local cemetery.
Goudsward: Yes, the original cemetery for Haverhill, the Pentucket Burial Ground. It’s on Water Street, just off of Mill, which was the original main town in the colony. And he probably went to that cemetery with a Hampstead, New Hampshire, resident named Myrta Little. Now, Myrta, unbeknownst to her, was just a friend. There were some very significant clues in her behavior that she was actually thinking she was in a romance — but that’s a sad story for another day.
Myrta knew Lovecraft followed the Salem Witch Trials. And in that cemetery there is Nathaniel Saltonstall, the son-in-law of John Ward, the founder of town. But he was also briefly one of the judges in Salem until he realized what a bad thing was going on — it was all spectral evidence, they were hanging people who had no crimes committed — and he left. And of course, they then accused him of witchcraft. By then, [the trials] had pretty well burnt out. But Haverhill could have had yet another witch.
That was the stone they went to see. Lovecraft got there and he saw it was just a Victorian addition. It was a memorial added hundreds of years later. It’s actually a rather ugly obelisk in the corner.
But he happened to notice a stone in front of it, which was for a colonial name, Nathanael Peaslee, to which Myrta Little said, “That’s one of my relatives. My maternal grandmother was a Peaslee.” So the name sort of stuck in his head when he was writing “Shadow Out of Time,” it became the name of the protagonist.
Rath: Well, your book is as much about people as it is places. Talk a bit about how the people helped make, as you say in the book, Lovecraft the writer that he was.
Goudsward: The problem with Lovecraft is when he first started writing, he was writing letters to the editor to magazines like Argosy. [He] got into a huge letter war about the quality of one of the writers who apparently had a very big fan base. And his letters were more eloquent than the letters of the respondents.
He was recruited into what was the amateur press movement, the United Amateur Press Association, which was simply a group of people who wrote material fiction, nonfiction, poetry and submitted it to little amateur presses that were usually run by a teenager or somebody who happened to own a press. They would put out 50 copies. They would send them to the organization who would bundle all of the different journals and magazines together and send them out.
Lovecraft sent a lot of material to Charles Smith in Haverhill — “Tryout Smith.” His magazine was called The Tryout. “Tryout Smith” was basically the incubator for Lovecraft. His poems are predominantly showing up there. Now, this is nothing to write home to mother about in terms of poetry. This is classical form over function. He knew what he was supposed to do to write a classic poem, but it is strictly a study in semantics and rhythm. But it got him published and it got him feedback from other members of the Amateur Press Association and it helped him craft his work better. His first couple of stories were published elsewhere, but the ones that are in The Tryout become significant in that he’s writing them specifically for an audience. He’s no longer just sitting at home writing for himself. And that is the beginning of H.P. Lovecraft as a writer.
