This article was written by Robert Anasi
 |
| Lovecraft's Memorial Plaque |
 |
 |
I never can be tied to raw new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,
And Georgian steeples toppd with gilded vanes -
These are the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.
- H.P. Lovecraft (written on his memorial plaque near the entrance to the John Hay Library at Brown University).
Standing at the top of Jenckes Street in Providence, Rhode Island, I am looking down – way down – between lines of historic houses. The road is so steep there's a stone wall at the bottom to keep the next car with faulty brakes out of someone's living room. Further away, I can see downtown and Federal Hill across the city. The city center looks nothing like it did when I was a boy – rivers have been moved, bridges demolished, and high-rises built – but the street around me is the same. In fact, it seems little different from H.P. Lovecraft's description of it in his short novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, even though Lovecraft was writing about the street as it was in 1900, when the neighborhood was already old.
He would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank wall and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner […]. It was getting to be a slum here but the titan elms cast a reassuring shadow over the place and the boy would stroll south past the long lines of the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals…Young Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, and red heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming so visible.
No matter where you go on the east side of Providence, you can't help but slide back through the centuries. I grew up in the city and it happened to me a thousand times. The past is alive there. This past played an essential role in shaping the imagination of the man who created modern horror writing.
H.P. Lovecraft was born in Providence on August 20, 1890. In his childhood, living links to the city's colonial heritage remained. His mother's family went back to the Plymouth Colony and Howard Philips knew Providence's oldest families. On the East Side in those days, he could run into an Angell on Angell Street, meet Tabers on Taber, or have lunch in a mansion built by his host's ancestors. A scholarly boy, Lovecraft dedicated his early years to scientific and historic research and writing poetry in imitation of Restoration authors like Pope. The deaths of his father (from syphilis) and his grandfather brought financial ruin to the family and drove his mother insane. Lovecraft was forced to find ways to earn a living, mostly by ghostwriting for clients who included Harry Houdini. The family tragedies affected Lovecraft's health and intensified his distrust of the modern world, especially immigrants, who he typically referred to as 'steaming mongrel flesh.' These immigrants – including my own Irish great-grandparents – were rapidly changing the East Side. In his fiction, Lovecraft often used historical figures like Moses Brown or gave his characters local-family names to memorialize a lost age.
Advertisement:
