Interlude

What's Chrispy been doing?

I just finished Brian Keene's A Gathering of Crows. I'm a Keene fan, and this one was a page turner. It has everything you would expect - the Labyrinthe, great and colorful characters, fast moving plot, death, mayhem, and enough religion, mythology, philiosophy, and political commentary to qualify for a college course. You don't have to know Machen, Lovecraft, and so forth to enjoy the book, but if you do it is a richer experience. I think I detected maybe a bit of Manly Wellman in this one.

Otherwise, I have been cramming like crazy learning about Lovecraft's ancestors, and retracing Whipple Phillips' life. The man deserves a book of his own. You think Lovecraft was colorful - pshaw! Whipple was a dynamo. Reading about him tires me out. Think about it. He was orphaned at 14 and made and lost several fortunes. You'd be stunned to know the enterprises he created - sometimes in a matter of months. Everytime you turn around he was at the legislature forming a new company with his "gang" of powerful venture capitalists. We really don't think enough about him.

Then there are the Lovecrafts. Great googly-woogly, talk about drama! No wonder they were expirtated. One drowned in a sailboat accident, one committed a Tabloid-style suicide, as did his mistress. One was committed as insane. Fortune made and lost. Fires! Gambling! Lawsuits! Hoo boy, were there lawsuits. Winfield came by it natural, me thinks.

And let's not forget the old homestead: Foster, Rhode Island. I never knew the controversy. Shakers! Anti-masonry! Temperance! Swindles! Vampires everywhere! You thought it was just Mercy Brown? Ha! Read Michael Bell's book (Food for the Dead) sometime and get shocked. For more than a century they were digging up bodies and burning hearts. Conversely, the government was struggling to get the farmland reinvigorated to keep rural Rhode Island from depopulating westward, and the Phillips' homesteads were being used for fertilizer experiments.

I tell ya Lovecraftians, what with the hodgepodge of Phillips, and Tillinghasts, and Tylers (Oh My!) it keeps your head spinning to keep it all straight.

From time to time I'll add notes here, but it's astonishing the number of primary documents curently in Google Books. You may like Lovecraft stories, but you will really begin to enjoy them and see how witty, catty, satirical, and flat out jokestery he can be when you get into the history of his ancestors. Scientifiction fans were clueless what he was talking baout when his stories were first published. We still are sometimes.

OK, we'll get back to more Lovecraftian goodies tomorrow.

Is this Mrs. Wood?

Happy 4th of July !!!
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Chrispy wondered, as he trolled the ancient documents of Da Google, if this was the Mrs. Wood? There are uncanny matches. There is also a minor disagreement that she was 100 in 1895, and lived in Worcester, MA at her end days. Foster, RI is some miles (more than Providence is to Foster, I think) from Worcester. However, HPL's recollection seemed to be her canned spiel to curious folks. Holmes' memory matches Lovecraft's closely. See specifically the bold sections of the two memories below.

However, an alternate interpretation is that Foster was but one stop on the "1896 vacation" tour and that the Lovecrafts also made it into Worcester? Alternatively, Mrs. Wood might have been carted about receiving various honors?
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HPL to August Derleth 9 September 1931

In 1896, when I was six years old, I was taken to visit in the Western Rhode Island region whence my maternal stockcame; and there met an ancient gentlewoman - a Mrs. Wood, daughter to a rebel officer in the late unfortunateuprising against His majesty's lawful authority - who was celebrating with proper pride her hundredth birthday. Mrs. Wood was born in the year 1796, and could walk and talk when Genl. Washington breath'd his last. And now, in 1896, I was conversing with her - with one who had talked to people in periwigs and three-cornered hats, and had studied schoolbooks with the long s! Young as I was, the idea gave mea tremendous feeling of cosmic victory over time.
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From: On the lineal descendents of William Wood who settled in Concord, Massachusetts in 1638. Compiled by Clay W Holmes of Elmira, NY (1901)

Nancy Wood, born Westminster, July 12, 1795. Married Nov. 12, IHIG to William Kilburn, son Calvin Kilburn of Princeton, born Sept. 29, 1789. He died in Holden, Oct. 21, 1867. She died July 4, 1898. To Nancy Wood belongs the distinction of having outlived any other member of the Wood race, so far as is known. Her early years were spent in Westminster. Immediately after her marriage they settled in Chaffinville, Holden. Here her married life was spent, seven children born. After nearly half a century her husband died and the remainder of her life was spent with her children in Michigan and Worcester, the last eight years with her daughter Myra Davis in Worcester. She celebrated her one hundredth birthday in 1895, and her portrait herewith presented is from a photograph taken on that day. At that time she retained her faculties to a wonderful degree. While her hearing and sight and powers of locomotion were impaired to a considerable degree, they were quite as good as with many of less years. Her memory of past events however was phenomenal, and conversation with her on early times was extremely interesting. She had lived under every president and remembered distinctly the impression produced on the country by the death of Washington, also the fact that her father and others wore crape at that time. She and her husband were passengers on the first railroad train from Worcester to Boston in 1835. At the period of her centennial, her direct descendants included eleven grand children and seven great grand children. Up to her 96th year she could walk comfortably on the street. She joined the Congregational Church early in life and continued a faithful member to the day of her death. She lacked but eight days of being one hundred and three years old at her death, which occurred at the home of her daughter Myra, in Worcester, July 4, 1898.
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So, she was born in 1795 and Lovecraft met her at six years old. It has now been 120 years since he was born! Dear Heavens! It's surrealistic! Have a Happy 4th of July, dead US compatriots. To all others, pray that our old red, white, and blue will strive to act more honorably in the future than we have in our past.