New York is a state in the United States of America, part of the Midatlantic region, adjacent to but not considered part of New England. While H. P. Lovecraft lived in and wrote repeatedly about New York City (see which), he also had a connection to the expansive, largely rural area to the north and west of the city, known as Upstate New York.
Lovecraft and Upstate New York[]
Lovecraft's father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, was born in Rochester, New York--a fact that was surely meaningful to the writer, given his preoccupation with ancestral taint and his father's descent into madness.
When the younger Lovecraft was living in Brooklyn with his wife Sonia Greene, he made his first visits to the state outside the city--visiting the near-upstate towns of Yonkers and Tarrytown in September 1925, as well as the Long Island villages of Jamaica, Mineola, Hempstead, and Garden City. After his separation from Greene and his return to Providence, he visited her in Brooklyn in April 1928, during which time he and Frank Belknap Long took a car trip up the Hudson Valley. In May 1928, Lovecraft visited Wilfred B. Talman in Spring Valley, in New York's Rockland County, returning through Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.[1] (The latter village is, of course, the setting of one of America's most famous ghost stories, Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", but as Lovecraft notes of Irving in Supernatural Horror in Literature, "most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature".)
In the spring of 1929, Lovecraft spent several week in Yonkers at the home of Vrest Orton. Later that year, Long drove him to West Shokan, N.Y., to visit correspondent Bernard Austin Dwyer. Concurrent tours of the nearby Dutch colonial towns of Kingston, Hurley, and New Paltz led to the travelogue “Travels in the Provinces of America” (1929). His last sojourn in Upstate New York seems to have been in Kingston in June 1930.[1]
In Lovecraft's Fiction[]
For Lovecraft stories set in New York City, see New York City#In Lovecraft's Fiction.
Lovecraft set a few of his stories in Upstate New York, including "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919) and "The Lurking Fear" (1922), and the revision tales "The Man of Stone" (1932) and "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" (1935).
Joe Slater, the main character of "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", is described as a
| “ | typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. | „ |
After Slater apparently murders a neighbour, he is examined by "alienists from Albany", New York's state capital, which further suggests that the "state psychopathic institution" where the story's narrator is an intern is in New York state--perhaps the Hudson River State Hospital, opened in 1871 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to serve the mental health needs of New York City and the state's eastern counties.[2]
"The Lurking Fear" is likewise set in New York's Catskill Mountains, once again portrayed as a region of genetic degenerates. The story centers on Tempest Mountain,
| “ | a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilisation once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few ruined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. | „ |
"The Man of Stone", written by Lovecraft for Hazel Heald, switches the location from the Catskills to the Adirondacks, but features as a minor character Sam, a "barefoot old mountain decadent", who would be at home in either of Lovecraft's Catskills stories.
The story's main antagonist is Daniel "Mad Dan" Morris, the descendant of Dutch settlers; his ancestor, William Van Kauran, settled in the colony of Rensselaerwyck[3] after his grandfather was hanged as a wizard in the Netherlands, later crossing over the Hudson River to Esopus. The Van Kauran family was notorious for its supernatural powers from Kingston to Hurley, N.Y.; one of their enemies, Squire Hasbrouck, was turned to stone in New Paltz in 1834. They participated in a Grand Sabbat on the Catskill's Sugar-Loaf mountain, where "queer things used to go on". (Sugar-Loaf is part of the Devil's Path, a range of mountains that gets its name from a local folktale that "the range's craggy cliffs were specially built by the devil so that he alone could climb them and occasionally retreat from the world of men."[4]
The Van Kaurans came to the (fictional) Adirondack village of Mountain Top when Morris's Uncle Hendrik was run out of town. Mountain Top "comprised only a few small houses, a hotel, and the general store".
"The Diary of Alonzo Typer" is set in the village of Chorazin, near Attica, N.Y., site of the Van der Heyl mansion, which "was very old, antedating the general white settlement of the region, and had formed the home of a strange and secretive family". Chorazin, a "straggling village", grew up around it, "populated by Indians and later by renegades from the surrounding country." Chorazin is yet another Upstate New York genetic backwater: "Of the singular hereditary strains which afterward appeared in the mixed Chorazin villagers, several monographs have been written by ethnologists." The "decadent Chorazin villagers" are noted for their "stupidity and taciturnity", which "baffle all students of the region and its secrets." Typer's diary is found by John Eagle, a "swarthy, simian-faced, Indian-like villager".
Near Chorazin and the van der Heyl house is
| “ | a steep hill crowned with a peculiar ring of ancient standing stones which the Iroquois always regarded with fear and loathing. The origin and nature of the stones, whose date, according to archaeological and climatological evidence, must be fabulously early, is a problem still unsolved. | „ |
Alonzo Typer himself is from Kingston, N.Y.
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, "Travels, Lovecraft's", S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.
- ↑ Wikipedia, "Hudson River State Hospital".
- ↑ Wikipedia, "Manor of Rensselaerswyck".
- ↑ Wikipedia, "Devil's Path (Catskills)".