Ebay : Lettre de HPL

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ORIGINAL-LETTER-HANDWRITTEN-BY-H-P-LOVECRAFT-/132036895089?hash=item1ebe032171:g:nxcAAOSwknJXxExA

4000 $








THIS IS A LETTER HANDWRITTEN IN 1932 BY HOWARD PHILLIPS LOVECRAFT HIMSELF.  THE LETTER READS AS FOLLOWS:



March 3, 1932
Jonckheer:—

Homage, honourable Trustee! If I only knew the Dutch for congratulations, rejoicing, & general superlatives I’d unload a whole double paragraph here & now!! As it is, the best tribute I can render is to remember to use your patent paper& steer clear of its perforated margin. Youth is certainly having its innings these days! Or rather, sheer ability & fitness are conquering the usual order of things. Phenomenal as is the choice of so tender‐year’d a dignitary, it is certainly a fact that they couldn’t have picked a better man. You certainly ought to feel pretty damn good about the matter – for think of the added standing it gives you is all phases of antiquarian pronouncement & debate! Now your articles on local nomenclature will have such weight that Spring Valley might as well order a new set of street signs & be done with it! I assume that your nomination – like a democratic one in South‐Carolina – is tantamount to election; & can only add that the patroons of Nieuw Nederland have again displayed that sound sense & good judgment which gave their colony so high a standing in the good old days. Now as to contributions – bless my soul, Son, but what business has a rank British outsider in your sacred circle? However, if you do welcome foreign perspectives on things, & if there’s anything I can say which will be of genuine interest, I’m sure I shall be glad to effuse. But first I want to see copies of the paper & get an idea of the kind of thing expected. It is very possible that the whole thing is out of my depth, since at bottom my acquaintance with Holland antiquities is damnably casual & layman like. As late as 1922 Sonny Belknap & I got fooled by the stepped gable of the fire station near Hanover Square & thought we’d discovered a real Dutch House – until we drew near & saw what it really was! As for Dutch architectural influence in Quebec & Charleston – I doubt that I could have mentioned any in the former town, although I may have remarked the superficial & partial resemblance (parallelism, not cause & effect) of the curved eaves of Quebec cottage roofs. As for Charleston – there is a question of Dutch influence, (direct from Leyden & not concerned with Nieuw Nederland) but unfortunately for the purposes of your periodical, my own frank opinion attributes a French source to the characteristics (a roof‐curve at the eaves like that in Quebec) which some trace to the Netherlands. However – it is a fact of presumable interest to Nieuw Nederlanders, that many settlers from their colony did emigrate to Charleston, & that one of the most prominent names in Charleston life is Vanderhorst – which soon acquired the local pronunciation Vandrorst (2 syllables). There was once a Vanderhorst Creek (now filled in) & there is still a Vanderhorst Street. Moreover, there is a fine multiple house (of English Georgian design) built about 1800 & now in desertion & decay which owes its origin to a Vanderhorst & is to this day known as Vanderhorst Row. This is today pointed out as the first apartment house in America, & I wish to Pegāna that some of you Dutchmen would raise a fund to save it from the ultimate collapse or destruction toward which it seems at present to be headed. When I was in Charleston I wrote you of a stepped gable in Queen St., but I think I added that its probably date – say 1820 – would classify it as a conscious archaism & exoticism rather than as any natural result of the Dutch element in Charleston. Just what would be acceptable – or what would be trite old stuff – to your clientele, you can judge much better than I. One might speak of the pitch of gambrel roofs in English homes – following the Dutch proportions in New York, New Jersey, & Pennsylvania, but having a long upper pitch in New England & in the relatively sparse Virginia examples. New‐England & Nieuw Nederland relations would fill a book, & could demand a far better historian than I. The Plymouth colony had several touches of Dutch influence, but these came primarily from Holland itself & not from Nieuw Nederland – although relations with Nieuw Amsterdam were maintained, & the Dutch man Isaac de Rasieres welcomed as a sort of commercial agent. Would accounts of very early Dutch penetrations of New England be of interest? I suppose you know that Adriaen Block mapped & named the features of our coast, & that attempts at founding forts & trading posts were made on the coast of Maine & in Rhode‐Island. Incidentally – are you Dutchmen paying much attention to the archaeological work at Fort Ninigret in Rhode Island’s South County, where evidence of Dutch origin & occupancy are steadily appearing? Up to last year the ruined stronghold was held to be the work of the Niantic Indians. If proved to be Dutch, as now seems almost certain, it will undoubtedly rank as the oldest structure in New England – any date subsequent to 1627 being inconceivable. However, the fact that it is a ruin & not a true edifice keeps the oldest‐house record safe for the ancient Fairbanks homestead in Dedham. But I can tell better when I see the publication just what sort of material it demands, & whether or not I am too rank a layman & superficialist to supply the right stuff. I wouldn’t for the world let you print anything likely to lower your status as a Trustee‐Editor amongst a select & highly exacting clientele. Incidentally – thanks enormously for compliment of suggesting that I contribute to this august enterprise. Oh, yes – & I hereby promise to return faithfully& intact any Halve Maens which may deign to cast their beams in my direction. Well – as you saw from my external P.S. of yesterday, I’ve got some new ancestors! But the richest joke on me came last evening, when I dug out the main chaos of family notes in order to look up possible Peter Place whom the old lady who sent me the data is trying to discover. I thought I ought to do her a favour in exchange for the information she had given me, so went through the tangled & long neglected papers with some degree of thoroughness. Well – I couldn’t find the Peter she wanted, but I did find a whole envelope of papers which I had never seen before, & which contained matter of the utmost interest to me. Ædepol! I don’t know who’s the champion nitwit – myself for never coming across this envelope before, or my aunts (or rather my elder aunt, for I don’t think Mrs. Gamwell knows anything about it or paid any attention to genealogy) for forgetting it & letting me flounder about in ignorance of the Rathbone & Perkins lines. But some kind of a joke is certainly on somebody! The point is, that my grandmother had a whole lot of data which for some reason or other was never copied on the charts from which I in turn made my charts when you started one off in 1927 – & that many things which were mysteries to me were not family mysteries at all! For instance – gawd forgive me for bothering you to help me unravel the Cooley book in Room 328 . . . . for my grandmother had the Rathbone line straight back to the first John of Block Island (1661)! Still, I’m not sorry to have seen the book, for there was stuff in it which we didn’t have, & it carried the line two steps behind old John to Richard of England. But more – there was a whole of a lot of very clear Perkins data which – although not solving the primary mystery of John Rathbone’s wife Olive – completely covered the other Perkins gap & made unnecessary most of the material just supplied so carefully by the old lady & so excitedly announced to you in yesterday’s P.S. The Godfrey, Safford, & West lines, it appears, were well known to my grandmother. However – the Newman line (which accounts for the repeated use of Newman as a Christian name by Perkinses & Places) was not mentioned in the notes; so I am after all not sorry I made my recent inquiries. There were one or two things in the notes which were not in the data supplied by my recent informant – among them a full tracing of the Perkins lineage to Old England. It seems that one John Perkins, of Newent, Gloucestershire, (b. 1590) came to Boston in 1630 on the Lion as a shipmate of Roger Williams. In 1633 he settled in Ipswich & became a military captain & deputy to the General Court. He had a son John – born in England in 1614 – & John had a son Samuel, born in Ipswich 1655. Sam served in King Philip’s War & was granted lands in Voluntown, Conn. His son (b. 1681) – by Hannah West – was Ebenezer Perkins, who filtered across the line into Coventry, R.I., married Hannah Safford, & in 1711 became the father of Newman Perkins, whose daughter Martha by Mehitable Godfrey became the wife of Stephen Place Sr. Meanwhile this same Newman Perkins in 1752 witnessed the will of that John Rathbone whose son John had married an Olive Perkins . . . . . but Olive is still unaccounted for. My new informant also helps out in another quarter by giving two generations of the ancestry of Patience Fish, who married the John Rathbone born in 1693. She will charge a fee for looking up the Mercy Dyer & Olive Perkins mysteries, but if it isn’t great I may let her go ahead. Hope I don’t pay good money & then find full data amongst the chaos hereabouts!

Well – congrats once more, o grave Trustee!

Yr obt – Grandpa