An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Goodenough, Arthur [Henry] (1871–1936).

American poet and amateur journalist from Brattleboro, Vt. He was the author of several small, privately printed volumes of poetry, including “Blossoms of Yesterday”(1896), My Lady’s Shoes and Other Poems(1911), Songs of Four Decades(1927), and Grass of Parnasses(ed. Walter John Coates) (1937). His poem “Lovecraft—an Appreciation” (included in his “Further Recollections of Amateur Journalism,” Vagrant,Spring 1927) was in parts so effusive that HPL thought it a parody, but Goodenough’s friend W.Paul Cook convinced him it was genuine. HPL accordingly responded with his own poetic tribute, “To Arthur Goodenough, Esq.” ( Tryout,September 1918). HPL visited Goodenough in Brattleboro in August 1927 and also in June 1928; this latter visit, in which several other local writers participated, was written up in the Brattleboro Reformer(June 18, 1928) under the title “Literary Persons Meet in Guilford.” Goodenough’s home seems to be a partial inspiration for Akeley’s home in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930).

Grandison, Robert.

In “The Trap,” a student who becomes entrapped in the magic mirror at the house of Gerald Canevin.

“Green Meadow, The.”

Short story (2,330 words); written in collaboration with Winifred Virginia Jackson, c. 1918 or 1919. First published in Vagrant(Spring 1927) (as “Translated by Elizabeth Neville Berkeley and Lewis Theobald, Jun.”); first collected in BWS;corrected text in HM

An introductory note states that the following narrative was found in a notebook embedded in a meteorite that landed in the sea near the coast of Maine. This notebook was made of some unearthly substance and the text was “Greek of the purest classical quality.”The narrative itself tells of a person who finds himself (or, conceivably, herself) on a peninsula near a rushing stream, not knowing who he is and how he got there. The peninsula breaks off its land mass and floats down the river, which is gradually wearing away the soil of the newly created island. The narrator sees in the distance a green meadow. His island is

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approaching it, and gradually he hears a weird singing on it; but as he approaches close enough to see “the sourceof the chanting,” he suddenly experiences a cataclysmic revelation: “therein was revealed the hideous solution of all which had puzzled me.” But after a few hints the text becomes illegible.

HPL admits that the story was based upon a dream that Jackson had, probably in late 1918, and that this dream “was exceptionally singular in that I had one exactly like it myself—save that mine did not extend so far. It was only when I had related my dream that Miss J. related the similar and more fully developed one” ( SL1.116). Elsewhere HPL states that he added the “quasi-realistic… introduction from my own imagination” (HPL to the Gallomo, [January] 1920; AHT). The fact of the document being in Greek is intended to suggest that it is the “narrative of an ancient Greek philosopher who had escaped from the earth and landed on some other planet” ( SL1.136), although it is difficult to arrive at this conclusion from the text alone.

See Stefan Dziemianowicz, “‘The Green Meadow’ and ‘The Willows’: Lovecraft, Blackwood, and a Peculiar Coincidence,” LSNos. 19/20 (Fall 1989): 33–39.

Gresham, Mr.

In “The Loved Dead,” the owner of the Gresham Corporation, a company that maintains the largest funeral parlors in the city of Fenham, who finds the narrator making love to a corpse and dismisses him from his service. Later Gresham dies in “the influenza epidemic” (i.e., of 1918–19). Grey Eagle, Chief.

In “The Curse of Yig” and “The Mound,” an American Indian, nearly 150 years old. It is he who corroborates much of the folklore constituting the narrative of “The Mound.”

Guiney, Louise Imogen (1861–1920).