An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Short story (3,010 words); probably written just prior to July 1919. First published in SR;rpt. MW In the year 1950 an old derelict, Old Bugs, haunts Sheehan’s Pool Room in Chicago. Although a drunkard, he exhibits traces of refinement and intelligence; no one can figure out why he carries an old picture of a lovely and elegant woman on his person at all times. One day a young man named Alfred Trever enters the place in order to “see life as it really is.” Trever is the son of Karl Trever, an attorney, and a woman who writes poetry under the name Eleanor Wing. Eleanor had once been married to a man named Alfred Galpin, a brilliant scholar but one imbued with “evil habits, dating from a first drink taken years before in woodland seclusion.” These habits had caused the termination of the marriage; Galpin had gained fleeting fame as an author but eventually dropped from sight. Meanwhile Old Bugs, listening to Alfred Trever tell of his background, suddenly leaps up and dashes the uplifted glass from Trever’s lips, shattering several bottles in the process. Old Bugs dies of overexertion, but Trever is sufficiently repulsed at the whole turn of events that his curiosity for liquor is permanently quenched. When the picture of the woman found on Old Bugs is passed around, Trever realizes that it is of his own mother: Old Bugs is the erstwhile Alfred Galpin. The story was written to dissuade Galpin—who wished to sample alcohol just prior to its being made illegal in July 1919—from engaging in such an activity. It is not nearly as ponderous as it sounds, and is in fact a little masterpiece of comic deflation and self-parody. The name Eleanor Wing is that of a girl in the Appleton High School Press Club; possibly Galpin was attracted to her. Galpin, in a brief introductory note to the first publication, states that at the end of the piece HPL had written: “Now will you be good?!”

“Old Christmas.”

Poem (322 lines); written in late 1917. First published in the Tryout(December 1918); rpt. National Enquirer(December 25, 1919).

HPL’s single longest poem, telling of the genial pleasures of an old English Christmas. HPL sent the poem through the Transatlantic Circulator, a group of Anglo-American amateur journalists; John Ravenor Bullen spoke highly of it: “…the ever-growing charm of eloquence (to which assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeic sound and rhythm, and tone colour contribute their entrancing effect) displayed in the poem under analysis, proclaims Mr. Lovecraft a genuine poet, and ‘Old Christmas’ an example of poetical architecture well-equipped to stand the test of time.”

“Old England and the ‘Hyphen.’”

Essay (1,140 words); probably written in the fall of 1916. First published in the Conservative (October 1916); rpt. MW

England should not be regarded as a foreign country to the “genuine native

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stock” of America, so that it is right that Americans should support the English in the European war. Olmstead, Robert (b. 1906).

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the young man who, on a sight-seeing and genealogical excursion to Newburyport, takes a detour in search of antiquarian sights to the shunned town of Innsmouth. While there, he learns the town’s blighted history, but having learned too much, he barely escapes with his life. In the aftermath of his harrowing experience, he finds through further genealogical study that he shares the ancestry of the hated citizens of Innsmouth; but he decides not to kill himself as others in his family had done when they learned the dreaded secret, but to accept and embrace his fate as one of the hybrid amphibian-people. His great-grandmother is Alice Marsh (not named specifically in the story), daughter of Capt. Obed Marsh and the sea-thing, Pth-thya-l’hi. She married Joshua Orne of Arkham; their daughter Eliza Orne married James Williamson of Cleveland, and their daughter, Mary Williamson, married Henry Olmstead of Akron (neither parent is named specifically in the story). Robert Olmstead is their son. This genealogy is explicitly spelled out only in HPL’s notes to the story (published in Cats[1949]).

Like Olmstead, HPL was an antiquarian and amateur genealogist, inclined to frugality. HPL well recognized the strong influence of heredity in his own life. Photographs of his family show a striking resemblance between HPL and ancestors of generations past. Olmstead was eight years old when his uncle Douglas Williamson committed suicide upon discovering his tainted ancestry. HPL surely was mindful of the madness of his own parents—he was eight years old when his father died in a madhouse.

Olney, Thomas.