A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

i A Dreamer and a Visionary ii

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies

General Editor DAVID SEED

Series Advisers

I. F. Clarke, Edward James, Patrick Parrinder and Brian Stableford

Robert Crossley Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future

David Seed (ed.) Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (eds) Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference

Brian W. Aldiss The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy

Carol Farley Kessler Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia, with Selected Writings

Patrick Parrinder Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy I. F. Clarke (ed.) The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come

Joseph Conrad and Ford Modox Ford (Foreword by George Hay, Introduction by David Seed) The Inheritors

Qingyun Wu Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias

John Clute Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews

Roger Luckhurst ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard Franz Rottensteiner (ed.) View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction Val Gough and Jill Rudd (eds) A Very Different Story: Studies in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Gary Westfahl The Mechanics of Wonder: the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction Jeanne Cortiel Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction Mike Ashley The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950, The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine, Volume I Patrick Parrinder (ed.) Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia

Warren Rochelle Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin

S. T. Joshi A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in his Time

iii A Dreamer and a Visionary H. P. Lovecraft in his Time S. T. JOSHI

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 2001 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street

Liverpool

L69 7ZU Copyright © Liverpool University Press 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Permission to quote extracts from the works of H. P. Lovecraft has been granted by Robert C. Harrall, Administrator of the Estate of H. P. Lovecraft British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available.

ISBN 0 85323 936 3 cased ISBN 0 85323 946 0 paperback

Typeset in Meridien by Koinonia, Bury, Lancashire Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow v

The Time Machines

Contents

Preface vii

Chapter One: Unmixed English Gentry 1

Chapter Two: A Genuine Pagan (1890–97) 8

Chapter Three: Black Woods and Unfathomed Caves

(1898–1902) 25

Chapter Four: What of Unknown Africa? (1902–08) 40

Chapter Five: Barbarian and Alien (1908–14) 62

Chapter Six: A Renewed Will to Live (1914–17) 77

Chapter Seven: Feverish and Incessant Scribbling (1917–19) 107

Chapter Eight: Cynical Materialist (1919–21) 125

Chapter Nine: The High Tide of My Life (1921–22) 143

Chapter Ten: For My Own Amusement (1923–24) 163

Chapter Eleven: Ball and Chain (1924) 186

Chapter Twelve: Moriturus Te Saluto (1925–26) 211

Chapter Thirteen: Paradise Regain’d (1926) 233

Chapter Fourteen: Cosmic Outsideness (1927–28) 251

Chapter Fifteen: Fanlights and Georgian Steeples (1928–30) 270

Chapter Sixteen: Non-supernatural Cosmic Art (1930–31) 293

Chapter Seventeen: Mental Greed (1931–33) 313

Chapter Eighteen: In My Own Handwriting (1933–35) 329

Chapter Nineteen: Caring about the Civilization (1929–37) 346

Chapter Twenty: The End of One’s Life (1935–37) 364

Epilogue: Thou Art Not Gone 389 Notes 393 Index 411

To David E. Schultz

… from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. —H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Tomb’ vii

The Time Machines

Preface

I do not believe that much needs to be said here regarding the scope and overall purpose of this volume. I have sought to trace, in some detail, the life of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, to supply some account of his major writings, and to give at least an outline of the philosophical thought that structures his work and in accordance with which he led his life. All these features have been treated in more detail elsewhere, but readers may find their fusion in this work of some benefit.

I have been involved in the study of Lovecraft for two and a half decades, and in that interim have incurred more debts of gratitude from colleagues than I could possibly repay or even record. When I first began to take a scholarly interest in Lovecraft, I was guided by Dirk W. Mosig, J. Vernon Shea, and George T. Wetzel; other colleagues such as R. Boerem, Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, Richard L. Tierney, Scott Connors, Matthew H. Onderdonk, Peter Cannon, and David E. Schultz also helped me considerably. Marc A. Michaud’s Necronomicon Press offered me abundant opportunities to expand my interests into realms I might otherwise not have pursued.

Much of my work on Lovecraft has of course been done at the John Hay Library of Brown University, the largest repository of Lovecraft material in the world. Its assistant librarian, John H. Stanley, has been of invaluable assistance in countless ways, as have such other librarians there as Jennifer B. Lee and Jean Rainwater. I have also done much work at the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Providence Public Library, the New York Public Library, the New York University Library, the Columbia University Library, and elsewhere.

The entire manuscript of this book has been read by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, and Steven J. Mariconda, both of whom (but Faig in particular) offered a great many useful suggestions. Other facts, large and small, have been supplied by Donald R. Burleson, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Perry M. Grayson, T. E. D. Klein, Dan Lorraine, viii PREFACE

Donovan K. Loucks, M. Eileen McNamara, M.D., Marc A. Michaud, Sam Moskowitz, Robert M. Price, David E. Schultz, A. Langley Searles, and Richard D. Squires. A Note on Sources

Because of the ready availability of most of Lovecraft’s work, I have not seen the need to cite editions of his tales, essays, and poems in this book, or indeed to supply a bibliography at all. Works by Lovecraft are chiefly cited from the editions listed below; full bibliographical information on works about Lovecraft is given in the notes.

Lovecraft’s juvenile fiction and poetry (1897–1905) is contained in my edition of Juvenilia (1984). The juvenile nonfiction (scientific periodicals and treatises) has not been published, but most of it can be found in the John Hay Library of Brown University. The following four volumes, edited by me, contain the great majority of Lovecraft’s stories and revisions:

The Dunwich Horror and Others (1984)

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (1985) Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (1986)

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (1989)

The remaining fiction is contained in my edition of Lovecraft’s Miscellaneous Writings (1995). Lovecraft’s poetry is contained in my edition of The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works (2001).

Lovecraft’s essays are not very readily available, but a large selection is contained in Miscellaneous Writings. There are many editions published by Necronomicon Press of select bodies of his work, of which note can be made of the following:

The Conservative: Complete (1976)

Writings in The United Amateur (1976)

The Californian (1977)

Uncollected Prose and Poetry (1978–82; 3 vols)

In Defence of Dagon (1985)

Autobiographical Writings (1992)

Other editions containing essays are August Derleth’s various miscellany volumes, Marginalia (1944), Something about Cats and Other Pieces (1949), The Shuttered Room and Other Pieces (1959), and The PREFACE ix Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966), as well as L. Sprague de Camp’s edition of To Quebec and the Stars (1976).

Because of the large quantity of Lovecraft’s letters and the valuable information they contain, I have been careful to cite these documents very specifically. The primary source for Lovecraft’s letters remains Selected Letters (1965–76; 5 vols; abbreviated as SL), even if many of the letters are abridged. This edition was itself founded upon an immense quantity of transcripts prepared by Arkham House over the years, and in many cases these transcripts contain fuller versions of the letters. I have abbreviated citations from these transcripts as AHT. Another substantial volume is Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (2000), edited by David E. Schultz and myself, and containing many of the autobiographical letters from which I have drawn so heavily in this book.

The manuscripts of many of Lovecraft’s letters are available at the John Hay Library of Brown University, the primary repository of works by and about Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s letters to August Derleth, and some other relevant documents, are at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.

CHAPTER ONE

Unmixed English Gentry

Only an intermittently diligent genealogist, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was able to discover little about the paternal side of his ancestry beyond the notes collected by his great-aunt Sarah Allgood. Subsequent genealogical research has failed to verify much of this information, especially regarding the Lovecrafts prior to their coming to America in the early nineteenth century. According to the Allgood notes, the Lovecraft or Lovecroft name does not appear any earlier than 1450, when various heraldic charts reveal Lovecrofts in Devonshire near the Teign. Lovecraft’s own direct line does not emerge until 1560, with John Lovecraft.

The paternal line becomes of immediate interest only with Thomas Lovecraft (1745–1826), who apparently lived such a dissolute life that he was forced in 1823 to sell the ancestral estate, Minster Hall near Newton Abbot. According to Lovecraft (or the notes he was consulting), Thomas Lovecraft’s sixth child, Joseph S. Lovecraft, decided in 1827 to emigrate, taking his wife Mary Fulford and their six children, John Full, William, Joseph, Jr, George, Aaron, and Mary, to Ontario, Canada. Finding no prospects there, he drifted down to the area around Rochester, New York, where he was established by at least 1831 as a cooper and carpenter.

Lovecraft’s paternal grandfather was George Lovecraft, who was probably born in 1818 or 1819.¹ In 1839 he married Helen Allgood (1821–81) and lived much of his life in Rochester as a harness maker. Of his five children, two died in infancy; the other three were Emma Jane (1847–1925), Winfield Scott (1853–1898), and Mary Louise (1855–1916). Winfield married Sarah Susan Phillips and begat Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Lovecraft appears to have been much more industrious in tracking down his maternal ancestry, but again his conclusions are not always to be trusted. At various points in his life he traced his maternal line either to the Rev. George Phillips (d. 1644), who in 1630 left England on the Arbella and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, or to Michael Phillips (1630?–86) of Newport, Rhode Island. Whatever the case, Asaph Phillips (1764–1829), probably Michael’s great-great-grandson, headed inland and settled around 1788 in Foster, in the west-central part of the state near the Connecticut border. Asaph and his wife Esther Whipple had eight children, all of whom, incredibly, survived to adulthood. The sixth child, Jeremiah Phillips (1800–48), built a water-powered grist mill on the Moosup River in Foster and was killed on 20 November 1848 when his flowing greatcoat got caught in the machinery, dragging him into it. As Jeremiah’s wife Roby Rathbun Phillips had died earlier in 1848, their four children were left as orphans. They were Susan, James, Whipple, and Abbie. Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833–1904) is Lovecraft’s maternal grandfather.

Whipple attended the East Greenwich Academy (then called The Providence Conference Seminary), probably prior to the death of his father Jeremiah. In 1852 he went to live with his uncle James Phillips (1794–1878) in Delavan, Illinois, a temperance town his relatives had founded; he returned the next year to Foster because the climate did not suit him. He married his first cousin, Robie Alzada Place (1827–1896),² on 27 January 1856, settling in a homestead in Foster built by Robie’s father Stephen Place. Their first child, Lillian Delora (1856–1932), was born less than three months later. There were four other children: Sarah Susan (1857– 1921), Emeline (1859–65), Edwin Everett (1864–1918), and Annie Emeline (1866–1941). Lovecraft’s mother Sarah Susan was born, as her own mother had been, at the Place homestead.

In 1855 Whipple purchased a general store in Foster and ran it for at least two years; he then presumably sold the store and its goods, probably at a substantial profit, thereby commencing his career as entrepreneur and land speculator. At that time he moved a few miles south of Foster to the town of Coffin’s Corner, where he built ‘a mill, a house, an assembly hall, and several cottages for employees’;³ since he had purchased all the land there, he renamed the town Greene (in honour of the Rhode Island Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene). It is remarkable to think of a twentyfour-year-old essentially owning an entire small town, but Whipple was clearly a bold and dynamic businessman, one who would gain and lose several fortunes in his crowded life.

One particular financial collapse, in 1870, led to the selling of the Place homestead in Foster and a move to Providence. Whipple settled initially on the West Side of Providence—the western shore of the Providence River, site of the present business district—since his business offices were in this general area. In connection with his various businesses he travelled widely in Europe, particularly France (he attended the Paris Exposition of 1878), England, and Italy.

By this time Whipple Phillips was clearly a man of substantial means, and, aside from building the house at 194 Angell Street in 1880–81, he undertook what was to be his most ambitious business enterprise: the establishment of the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company in Owyhee County in the southwest corner of Idaho, ‘which had for its object the damming of the Snake River & the irrigation of the surrounding farming & fruit-growing region’.⁴ Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, has performed a remarkable feat of excavation in supplying the details of his enterprise, and I can do no better than to summarize his findings.⁵

The company was incorporated in Providence as the Snake River Company as early as 1884, with Whipple as president and his nephew Jeremiah W. Phillips as secretary and treasurer. Initially the company dealt in land and livestock, but shortly thereafter Whipple shifted his attention to the building of a dam—not over the Snake River, as Lovecraft erroneously believed, but over its tributary, the Bruneau River.

Work on the dam began in the autumn of 1887 and was completed by early 1890. Whipple purchased a ferry in 1887 and established a town near the ferry on the Snake River, naming it Grand View. He also built a Grand View Hotel, to be managed by his son Edwin. At this point disaster struck. On 5 March 1890, the dam was completely washed out by high waters, and the $70,000 spent in constructing it was lost. A new dam was begun in the summer of 1891 and completed by February 1893.

Whipple was, of course, by no means permanently at the site; indeed, he appears to have visited it only occasionally. We shall see that, when he was not in Idaho, he was spending considerable time and effort (especially after April 1893) raising his then only grandchild, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

The Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company suffered some sort of financial difficulties around 1900, and on 12 March 1901 the company was sold at a sheriff’s sale in Silver City. Whipple Phillips was one of five purchasers, but the total property value of the company had been assessed on 25 May 1900 at only $9430. The final blow came in early 1904, when the dam was wiped out again. Lovecraft states that this second disaster ‘virtually wiped the Phillips family out financially & hastened my grandfather’s death— age 70, of apoplexy’.⁶ Whipple Phillips died on 28 March 1904; after his death three other individuals bought out his interest in the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company and renamed it the Grand View Irrigation Company, Ltd.

It is clear that the Owyhee project was Whipple’s principal business concern during his later years, although no doubt he had other interests in Providence and elsewhere, as his wide travels suggest. He did, however, certainly lose a good deal of money in the Idaho venture. Nevertheless, the picture that emerges of Whipple Phillips is that of an abundantly capable businessman—bold, innovative, and perhaps a little reckless—but also a man of wide culture and one who took great concern in the financial, intellectual, and personal well-being of his extended family.

Lovecraft’s elder aunt, Lillian Delora Clark, attended the Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College) in Norton, Massachusetts, for at least the period 1871–73. Lovecraft states that she ‘also attended the State Normal School, and was for some time a teacher’,⁷ but her attendance at the Normal School has not been confirmed. Lovecraft was proud of the artistic skills of both his aunt and his mother, and claimed that Lillian has ‘had canvases hung in exhibitions at the Providence Art Club’.⁸

Lovecraft speaks little of his uncle, Edwin Everett Phillips, and does not seem to have been close to him. Edwin briefly assisted his father in his Idaho enterprise, but he returned to Providence in 1889 and attempted—not very successfully, it appears—to go into business for himself. In 1894 he married Martha Helen Mathews; at some point they were divorced, then remarried in 1903. Throughout his life Edwin held various odd jobs, and at some point established the Edwin E. Phillips Refrigeration Company. His one significant involvement with Lovecraft and his mother was, as we shall see, an unfortunate one.

Annie Emeline Phillips, Lovecraft’s younger aunt, was nine years younger than Susie. Lovecraft remarks that she ‘was yet a very young lady when I first began to observe events about me. She was rather a favourite in the younger social set, & brought the principal touch of gayety to a rather conservative household.’⁹ I know nothing about her education.

We can finally turn our attention to Sarah Susan Phillips, born on 17 October1857. Regrettably little is known about her early years. Lovecraft states that she, like Lillian, attended Wheaton Female Seminary, but her attendance can be confirmed only for the school year 1871–72. From this period up to the time of her marriage in 1889 the record is blank. Clara Hess, a friend of the Lovecrafts, gives a description of Susie, probably dating from the late 1890s: ‘She was very pretty and attractive, with a beautiful and unusually white complexion—got, it is said, by eating arsenic, although whether there was any truth to this story I do not know. She was an intensely nervous person.’¹⁰ Elsewhere Hess remarks: ‘She had a peculiarly shaped nose which rather fascinated me, as it gave her a very inquiring expression. Howard looked very much like her.’¹¹

What little we know of Winfield Scott Lovecraft prior to his marriage derives from research recently conducted by Richard D. Squires of the Wallace Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology.¹² Winfield was born on 26 October 1853, probably at the home of George and Helen Lovecraft at 42 Marshall Street in Rochester. George Lovecraft was at the time a ‘traveling agent’ for the Ellwanger & Barry Nursery, a major business in Rochester. The family attended services at the Grace Episcopal (now St Paul’s) Church. These facts may be of some relevance to Winfield, since he was himself a salesman and was married at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston, even though his bride was a Baptist.

From 1871 to 1873 Winfield was employed as a blacksmith for the James Cunningham & Son carriage factory, Rochester’s largest employer for many years. During this time he boarded with another uncle, John Full Lovecraft, in a home on Marshall Street. By 1874 all traces of Winfield Scott Lovecraft disappear from the records in Rochester.

Lovecraft stated on several occasions that his father was educated at a military school, but the location of this military school has not been traced; Winfield clearly did not attend West Point, as a check of its registry of graduates establishes. It is possible that it may not have been a formal military academy (of which there were very few at the time) but a school that emphasized military training. In any event, it is likely to have been local—somewhere in New York State, perhaps close to the Rochester area.

At some point Winfield moved to New York City, as this is given as his place of residence on his marriage certificate. He probably roomed there with his cousin, Frederick A. Lovecraft (1850–93). It is believed that he became employed by Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, of Providence, then one of the major business concerns in the city. The evidence for this employment does not derive from any statement by Lovecraft, but from a remark by Lovecraft’s wife Sonia in her 1948 memoir.¹³ It is not clear how and when Winfield began work for Gorham (assuming that he actually did so), and why, even if he was working as a travelling salesman, he was listed as a resident of New York City at the time of his marriage on 12 June 1889.

Equally a mystery is how he met Sarah Susan Phillips and how they fell in love. Susie certainly does not appear to have been a ‘society girl’ like her sister Annie, and Winfield was not a door-todoor salesman, so that he is not likely to have met her in this way; nor, if he had, would the social mores of the time have allowed them to fraternize. The Phillipses were, after all, part of the Providence aristocracy.

The fact that the wedding ceremony took place at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Boston may or may not be noteworthy. We have already seen that Winfield’s family was Episcopal; and, although there were many Episcopal churches in Providence where the ceremony could have taken place, the fact that Winfield planned to settle his family in the Boston area may have made St Paul’s a logical site. Indeed, it might have been odd for a member of the Phillips family of Providence, so associated with the Baptist faith, to have been married in a local Episcopal church. I discount the possibility, therefore, that the marriage was somehow not approved by Susie’s parents, for which no true evidence exists. Although she was thirty-one at the time of the marriage, Susie was the first of Whipple Phillips’s daughters to be married; as she was still living under his roof, it is not likely that he would have allowed her to marry someone of whom he did not approve.

Lovecraft, so keen on racial purity, was fond of declaring that his ‘ancestry was that of unmixed English gentry’;¹⁴ and if one can include a Welsh (Morris) strain on his paternal side and an Irish (Casey) strain on his maternal, then the statement can pass. His maternal line is, indeed, far more distinguished than his paternal, and we find Rathbones, Mathewsons, Whipples, Places, Wilcoxes, Hazards, and other old New England lines behind Susie Lovecraft and her father Whipple Van Buren Phillips. What we do not find— as Lovecraft frequently bemoaned—is much in the way of intellectual, artistic, or imaginative distinction. But if Lovecraft himself failed to inherit the business acumen of Whipple Phillips, he did somehow acquire the literary gifts that have resulted in a subsidiary fascination with his mother, father, grandfather, and the other members of his near and distant ancestry.

CHAPTER TWO

A Genuine Pagan (1890–97)

In April 1636 Roger Williams left the Massachusetts-Bay colony and headed south, settling first on the east bank of the Seekonk River and later, when Massachusetts asserted territorial rights to this region, on the west bank. He named this site Providence. Williams’s immediate reason for seeking new territory was, of course, religious freedom: his own Baptist beliefs did not sit well with the Puritan theocracy of the Massachusetts-Bay. The religious separatism present at the very birth of Rhode Island left a permanent legacy of political, economic, and social separatism in the state.

Although Roger Williams had negotiated with the Indians for his plot of land at Providence, the native population of Rhode Island did not fare so well thereafter. King Philip’s War (1675–76) was devastating to both sides, but particularly to the Indians (Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Sakonnets, and Niantics), who were nearly wiped out, their pitiful remnants huddled together on a virtual reservation near Charlestown. The rebuilding of the white settlements that had been destroyed in Providence and elsewhere was slow but certain; from now on it would not be religious freedom or Indian warfare that would concern the white colonists, but economic development. In the eighteenth century the four Brown brothers (John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses) would be among the leading entrepreneurs in the Colonies. It is, however, a stain on Rhode Island’s record that it was one of the leading slave-trading states both before and just after the Revolution, its many merchant vessels (some of them privateers) carting away hundreds of thousands of slaves, mostly from the West Indies. Relatively few ended up actually in Rhode Island; most that did so worked on large plantations in the southern part of the state.

Much to the chagrin of Lovecraft’s Tory sentiments, Rhode Island was a spearhead of the Revolution, and people here were more united in favour of independence than in the other colonies. Stephen Hopkins, provincial governor of Rhode Island for much of the period between 1755 and 1768, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Separatist to the end, however, Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention and was the last of the thirteen colonies to ratify the Federal Constitution.

Roger Williams had founded the Baptist church in Rhode Island—the first in America—in 1638. For more than two centuries the state remained largely Baptist, but other sects came in over time. There were Quakers, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other, smaller groups. A colony of Jews had been present since the seventeenth century, but their numbers were small and they were careful to assimilate with the Yankees. Roman Catholics began to be prominent only in the middle nineteenth century. Their numbers were augmented by successive waves of immigration: French Canadians during the Civil War (establishing themselves especially in the town of Woonsocket in the northeast corner of the state), Italians after 1890 (settling in the Federal Hill area of Providence’s West Side), Portuguese shortly thereafter. It is disturbing, but sadly not surprising, to note the increasing social exclusiveness and scorn of foreigners developing among the old-time Yankees throughout the nineteenth century. The Know-Nothing Party, with its anti-foreign and anti-Catholic bias, dominated the state during the 1850s. Rhode Island remained politically conservative into the 1930s, and Lovecraft’s entire family voted Republican throughout his lifetime. If Lovecraft voted at all, he also voted Republican almost uniformly until 1932. The state’s leading paper, the Providence Journal, remains conservative to this day even though the state has been largely Democratic since the 1930s.

Newport, on the southern end of Aquidneck Island, gained early ascendancy in what became Rhode Island, and Providence did not overtake it until after the Revolutionary war. By 1890 Providence was the only city of any significant size in the state: its population was 132,146, making it the twenty-third largest city in the nation. Its principal topographic features are its seven hills and the Providence River, which divides at Fox Point and splits into the Seekonk River on the east and the Moshassuck River on the west. Between these two rivers is the East Side, the oldest and most exclusive part of the city, especially the lofty eminence of College Hill, which rises steeply on the east bank of the Moshassuck. The area west of the Moshassuck is the West Side—the downtown area and a newer residential district. To the north lies the suburb of Pawtucket, to the northwest North Providence, to the southwest Cranston, and to the east—on the other side of the Seekonk—the suburbs of Seekonk and East Providence.

Brown University—founded in 1764 (as King’s College) under Baptist auspices—lords it on the pinnacle of College Hill, and has lately been gobbling up more and more of the surrounding colonial area. This is the oldest part of the city in terms of the structures still surviving, although nothing dates before the middle of the eighteenth century. Lovecraft would have been heartened by the tremendous restoration of the colonial houses on College Hill in the 1950s and onward, conducted under the auspices of the Providence Preservation Society. The restoration has caused Benefit Street in particular to be regarded as the finest mile of colonial architecture in the United States.

To the east of College Hill is a spacious array of residences dating no earlier than the middle nineteenth century but impressively built and with well-kept grounds and gardens. This, rather than the colonial area, is the true home of the Providence aristocracy and plutocracy. At the eastern edge of this area, running alongside the Seekonk River, is Blackstone Boulevard, whose luxurious homes are still the haven of old Yankee money. At the northern end of Blackstone Boulevard is Butler Hospital for the Insane, opened in 1847. Juxtaposed to Butler Hospital on its north side is the vast expanse of Swan Point Cemetery—not perhaps quite as lavishly landscaped as Mt Auburn in Boston but one of the most topographically beautiful cemeteries in the country.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born at 9 a.m.¹ on 20 August 1890, at 194 (renumbered 454 in 1895–96) Angell Street on what was then the eastern edge of the East Side of Providence. The sequence and details of the family’s travels and residences in the period 1890–93 are very confused. It appears that Winfield and Susie Lovecraft took up residence in Dorchester, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston), as soon as they married on 12 June 1889. They came to Providence late in Susie’s pregnancy, then presumably moved back to Dorchester a few weeks or months after Howard was born, then moved to the Auburndale area (also in the Boston metropolitan zone) in 1892. There may even have been other temporary residences in the area. Lovecraft states in 1934:

My first memories are of the summer of 1892—just before my second birthday. We were then vacationing in Dudley, Mass., & I recall the house with its frightful attic water-tank & my rocking-horses at the head of the stairs. I recall also the plank walks laid to facilitate walking in rainy weather—& a wooded ravine, & a boy with a small rifle who let me pull the trigger while my mother held me.²

Dudley is in the west-central portion of Massachusetts. In Auburndale the Lovecrafts stayed at least briefly with the poet Louise Imogen Guiney and her mother. Letters from Guiney to F. H. Day, dating to May, June, and July 1892, have been thought to allude to the Lovecrafts; however, recent research by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, reveals that the persons in question were some German visitors. Lovecraft himself states that ‘we stayed [at the Guineys’] during the winter of 1892–93’,³ and in the absence of contrary evidence we are compelled to accept this testimony.

Lovecraft says that Guiney (1861–1920) ‘had been educated in Providence, where she met my mother years before’.⁴ There is some little mystery around this. Guiney was indeed educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart at 736 Smith Street in the Elmhurst section of Providence, attending the school from the year it opened in 1872 until 1879; but Susie, as we have seen, attended the Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, for at least the period 1871–72. Although Guiney scholar Henry G. Fairbanks asserts that the Sacred Heart accepted Protestants as well as Catholics,⁵ I think it is unlikely that Susie was actually sent there. Nevertheless, one must assume that Susie and Guiney somehow became acquainted during this time. It is possible that Lovecraft exaggerated the degree of his mother’s acquaintance with Guiney; or perhaps his mother herself did so to her son. She may have stressed the Guiney connection once she saw Lovecraft developing into a writer himself. Lovecraft’s memories of Auburndale—especially of the Guiney residence—are numerous and clear:

I distinctly recall the quiet, shady suburb as I saw it in 1892 … Miss Guiney kept a most extraordinary collection of St. Bernard dogs, all named after authors and poets. A shaggy gentleman by the classic name of Brontë was my particular favourite & companion, being ever in attendance on my chariot as my mother wheeled that vehicle through the streets & avenues. Brontë would permit me to place my fist in his mouth without biting me, & would snarl protectingly if any stranger approached me.⁶

Another memory Lovecraft had was the tableau of a railway bridge in the city:

I can see myself as a child of 2¹/₂ on the railway bridge at Auburndale, Mass., looking across and downward at the business part of the town, and feeling the imminence of some wonder which I could neither describe nor fully conceive—and there has never been a subsequent hour of my life when kindred sensations have been absent.⁷ His first literary stirrings can be dated to this period:

At the age of two I was a rapid talker, familiar with the alphabet from my blocks & picture-books, & … absolutely metre-mad! I could not read, but would repeat any poem of simple sort with unfaltering cadence. Mother Goose was my principal classic, & Miss Guiney would continually make me repeat parts of it; not that my rendition was necessarily notable, but because my age lent uniqueness to the performance.⁸

Guiney herself seems to have taken to the infant; she would repeatedly ask, ‘Whom do you love?’ to which Lovecraft would pipe back: ‘Louise Imogen Guiney!’⁹

Lovecraft had a brief encounter with a distinguished friend of Guiney’s, Oliver Wendell Holmes—one of many fleeting brushes with established writers he would have throughout his life: ‘Oliver Wendell Holmes came not infrequently to this [Guiney’s] menage, and on one occasion (unremembered by the passenger) is said to have ridden the future Weird Tales disciple on his venerable knee.’¹⁰ Holmes (1809–94) was at this time very old, and was indeed a close friend of Guiney; no doubt he failed to remember for very long his meeting with the future master of weird fiction.

Lovecraft’s early residences and travels were, of course, dictated by his father’s business. The latter’s medical record lists him as a ‘Commercial Traveller’, and Lovecraft frequently affirms that his father’s commercial interests kept him and his family in the Boston area during the period 1890–93. There is little reason to doubt Lovecraft when he says that ‘my image of him is but vague’:¹¹ Winfield lived with his family for only the first two and a half years of Lovecraft’s life, and perhaps less than that if his business trips took him very far afield for long periods of time.

The illness that struck Winfield Scott Lovecraft in April 1893 and forced him to remain in Butler Hospital in Providence until his death in July 1898 is worth examining in detail. The Butler Hospital medical record reads as follows:

For a year past he has shown obscure symptoms of mental disease—doing and saying strange things at times; has, also, grown pale and thin in flesh. He continued his business, however, until Apr. 21, when he broke down completely while stopping in Chicago. He rushed from his room shouting that a chambermaid had insulted him, and that certain men were outraging his wife in the room above. He was extremely noisy and violent for two days, but was finally quieted by free use of the bromides, which made his removal here possible. We can get no history of specific disease.

Upon Winfield’s death in 1898, the medical record diagnosed him as having ‘General Paralysis’; his death certificate listed the cause of death as ‘general paresis’. In 1898 (and, for that matter, today) these terms were virtually synonymous. What was not then known —and would not be known until 1911—was the connection between general paresis and syphilis. Although general paresis was a kind of catch-all term for a variety of ailments, M. Eileen McNamara, M.D., studying Winfield’s medical record, has concluded that the probability of Winfield’s having tertiary syphilis is very strong. Winfield displayed nearly all the symptoms of tertiary syphilis as identified by Hinsie and Campbell in their Psychiatric Dictionary (4th ed., 1970):

(1) simple dementia, the most common type, with deterioration of intellect, affect and social behavior; (2) paranoid form, with persecutory delusions; (3) expansive or manic form, with delusions of grandiosity; or (4) depressive form, often with absurd nihilistic delusions.¹²

The medical record clearly bears out at least the first three of these symptoms: (1) on 28 April 1893 ‘the patient … broke out violently this morning—rushed up and down the ward shouting and attacked watchman’; (2) 29 April 1893: ‘says three men—one a negro—in the room above trying to do violence to his wife’; 15 May 1893: ‘believes his food is poisoned’; 25 June 1893: ‘looks upon the officers and attendants as enemies and accuses them of stealing his clothing, watch, bonds, &c.’; (3) under the heading ‘Mental Condition’: ‘boasts of his many friends; his business success, his family, and above all his great strength—asking writer to see how perfectly his muscles are developed’. For the fourth symptom—depression—the record is not sufficiently detailed to make a conjecture.

If, then, it is admitted that Winfield had syphilis, the question is how he contracted it. At this point, of course, we can only indulge in conjecture. McNamara reminds us that the ‘latent period between inoculation and the development of tertiary syphilis is ten to twenty years’, so that Winfield ‘might have been infected as early as eighteen or as late as twenty-eight, well before his marriage at age thirty-five’.¹³ It is, unfortunately, exactly this period of Winfield’s life about which nothing is known. It is difficult to doubt that Winfield contracted syphilis either from a prostitute or from some other sex partner prior to his marriage, either while attending the military academy or during his stint as a ‘Commercial Traveller’, if indeed that began so early as the age of twenty-eight. (The conjecture that Lovecraft himself might have had congenital syphilis is disproved by the fact that the Wassermann test he was given during his own final illness was negative.)

The course of Winfield’s illness makes horrifying reading. After the first several months the entries become quite sporadic, sometimes as many as six months passing before a notation is made. Occasionally there are signs of improvement; sometimes Winfield seems to be failing, and toward the end of 1895 it was thought that he had only days to live. A few times he was permitted to go about the ward or take some air in the yard. His condition began to decline markedly by the spring of 1898. By May he had developed constipation and required an enema every three days. On 12 July he had a temperature of 103° and a pulse of 106, with frequent convulsions. On 18 July he ‘passe[d] from one convulsion into another’ and was pronounced dead the next day.

The trauma experienced by Susie Lovecraft over this excruciating period of five years—with doctors ignorant of how to treat Winfield’s illness, and with periods of false hope where the patient seems to recover only to lapse into more serious physical and mental deterioration—can only be imagined. When Susie herself was admitted to Butler Hospital in 1919, her doctor, F. J. Farnell, ‘found disorder had been evidenced for fifteen years; that in all, abnormality had existed at least twenty-six years’.¹⁴ It is no accident that the onset of her ‘abnormality’ dates to 1893.

The critical issue, of course, is what—if anything—Lovecraft himself knew of the nature and extent of his father’s illness. He was two years and eight months old when his father was committed, and seven years and eleven months old when his father died. If he was already reciting poetry at two and a half, he must at least have been aware that something peculiar had happened—why else would he and his mother have moved suddenly back from Auburndale to the maternal home in Providence?

It is obvious from Lovecraft’s remarks that he was intentionally kept in the dark about the specific nature of his father’s illness. One wonders, indeed, whether Susie herself knew all its particulars. Lovecraft’s first known statement on the matter occurs in a letter of 1915: ‘In 1893 my father was seized with a complete paralytic stroke, due to insomnia and an overstrained nervous system, which took him to the hospital for the remaining five years of his life. He was never afterward conscious.’¹⁵ It need hardly be said at this point that nearly every part of this utterance is false. When Lovecraft refers to a ‘complete paralytic stroke’, either he is remembering some deliberate falsehood he was told (i.e., that his father was paralysed), or he has misconstrued the medical term ‘General Paralysis’ or some account of it that he heard. The medical record does confirm that Winfield was overworked (‘Has been actively engaged in business for several years and for the last two years has worked very hard’), and no doubt Lovecraft was told this also; and the remark about Winfield not being conscious may have been the excuse he was given for not visiting his father in the hospital.

One matter of importance is whether Lovecraft ever saw his father in Butler Hospital. He never says explicitly that he did not, but his late statement that ‘I was never in a hospital till 1924’¹⁶ certainly suggests that he himself believed (or claimed to others) that he never did so. Recently there has been speculation that Lovecraft did indeed visit his father in the hospital; but there is absolutely no documentary evidence of this. I believe that this speculation is an inference from the fact that on two occasions—29 August 1893 and 29 May 1894—Winfield was taken out into the ‘yard’ and the ‘airing-court’; but there is no reason to believe that the three- or four-year-old Lovecraft, or his mother, or anyone at all, visited him at this or any other time.

Perhaps more important than all these matters is the image and tokens of his father which Lovecraft retained in maturity. Remarking that ‘In America, the Lovecraft line made some effort to keep from becoming nasally Yankeeised’, he continues: ‘my father was constantly warned not to fall into Americanisms of speech and provincial vulgarities of dress and mannerisms—so much so that he was generally regarded as an Englishman despite his birth in Rochester, N.Y. I can just recall his extremely precise and cultivated British voice.’¹⁷ We need look no further for the source of Lovecraft’s own Anglophilia—his pride in the British Empire, his use of British spelling variants, and his desire for close cultural and political ties between the United States and England. At about the age of six, ‘when my grandfather told me of the American Revolution, I shocked everyone by adopting a dissenting view … Grover Cleveland was grandpa’s ruler, but Her Majesty, Victoria, Queen of Great Britain & Ireland & Empress of India commanded my allegiance. “God Save the Queen!” was a stock phrase of mine.’¹⁸ It would be going too far to suggest that Lovecraft’s father actually induced his son to take the British side in the American revolution; but it is clear that the maternal side of his family, proud Yankees as they were, did not share that view. Winfield Townley Scott reports that a ‘friend of the family’ referred to Winfield as a ‘pompous Englishman’.¹⁹ This appears to be Ella Sweeney, a schoolteacher who knew the Lovecrafts from as early as their 1892 vacation in Dudley. Even individuals beyond Lovecraft’s immediate family appear to have found Winfield’s English bearing a little trying. It is poignant to hear Lovecraft tell of his one genuine memory of his father:

I can just remember my father—an immaculate figure in black coat & vest & grey striped trousers. I had a childish habit of slapping him on the knees & shouting ‘Papa, you look just like a young man!’ I don’t know where I picked that phrase up; but I was vain & self-conscious, & given to repeating things which I saw tickled my elders.²⁰

This litany of his father’s clothing—’his immaculate black morningcoat and vest, ascot tie, and striped grey trousers’—is found in an earlier letter, and Lovecraft adds touchingly: ‘I have myself worn some of his old ascots and wing collars, left all too immaculate by his early illness and death.’²¹

Winfield Scott Lovecraft was buried on 21 July 1898 in the Phillips plot in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence. There is every reason to believe that young Howard attended this service. The mere fact that he was buried here is (as Kenneth W. Faig has noted)²² a testimony to Whipple Phillips’s generosity of heart, and perhaps even an indication that Whipple paid for Winfield’s medical expenses; Winfield’s estate was valued at $10,000 upon his death, and it is unlikely that it could have been so great if it had been used for full-time hospital costs for more than five years.

The immediate effect of the hospitalization of Winfield Scott Lovecraft was to bring the two-and-a-half-year-old Howard more closely than ever under the influence of his mother, his two aunts (both of whom, as yet unmarried, were still residing at 454 Angell Street), his grandmother Robie, and especially his grandfather Whipple. Naturally, his mother’s influence was at the outset the dominant one.

For his part, Whipple Van Buren Phillips proved to be an entirely satisfactory replacement for the father Lovecraft never knew. Lovecraft’s simple statement that at this time ‘my beloved grandfather … became the centre of my entire universe’²³ is all we need to know. Whipple cured his grandson of his fear of the dark by daring him at the age of five to walk through a sequence of dark rooms at 454 Angell Street; he showed Lovecraft the art objects he brought from his travels to Europe; he wrote him letters when travelling on business; and he even recounted extemporaneous weird tales to the boy.

And so, with Whipple virtually taking the place of his father, Howard and his mother seemed to lead a normal enough life; indeed, with Whipple’s finances still robust, Lovecraft had an idyllic and actually rather spoiled early childhood.

He appears to have begun reading at the age of four, and one of his earliest books appears to have been Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The next year, he discovered a seminal book in his aesthetic development: the Arabian Nights. The book’s effect upon Lovecraft was immediate and pronounced:

how many dream-Arabs have the Arabian Nights bred! I ought to know, since at the age of 5 I was one of them! I had not then encountered Graeco-Roman myth, but found in Lang’s Arabian Nights a gateway to glittering vistas of wonder and freedom. It was then that I invented for myself the name of Abdul Alhazred, and made my mother take me to all the Oriental curio shops and fit me up an Arabian corner in my room.²⁴

Elsewhere, however, Lovecraft provides a different (and probably more accurate) account of the coining of the name Abdul Alhazred: ‘I can’t quite recall where I did get Abdul Alhazred. There is a dim recollection which associates it with a certain elder—the family lawyer, as it happens, but I can’t remember whether I asked him to make up an Arabic name for me, or whether I merely asked him to criticise a choice I had otherwise made.’²⁵ The family lawyer was Albert A. Baker, who would be Lovecraft’s legal guardian until 1911. His coinage (if indeed it was his) was a singularly infelicitous one from the point of view of Arabic grammar, since the result is a reduplicated article (Abdul Alhazred). In any event, the name stuck.

The Arabian Nights may not have definitively steered Lovecraft toward the realm of weird fiction, but it certainly did not impede his progress in that direction. Although only a relatively small proportion of tales are actually supernatural, there are abundant accounts of crypts, tombs, caves, deserted cities, and other elements that would form significant features in Lovecraft’s imaginative landscape.

What might have finally stacked the deck in favour of the weird for Lovecraft was his unexpected discovery of an edition of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Gustave Doré, which he stumbled upon at the house of a friend of his family’s at the age of six. Here is the impression the poem, and the pictures, made upon a young Lovecraft:

Fancy … the discovery of a great atlas-sized gift-book leaning against the mantel & having on the cover gilt letters reading ‘With Illustrations by Gustave Doré’. The title didn’t matter—for didn’t I know the dark, supernal magic of the Doré pictures in our Dante & Milton at home? I open the book—& behold a hellish picture of a corpse-ship with ragged sails under a waning moon! I turn a page … God! A spectral, half-transparent ship on whose deck a corpse & a skeleton play at dice! By this time I am flat on the bearskin rug & ready to thumb through the whole book … of which I’ve never heard before … A sea full of rotting serpents, & death-fires dancing in the black air … troops of angels & daemons … crazed, dying, distorted forms … dead men rising in their putrescence & lifelessly manning the dank rigging of a fate-doomed barque …²⁶

Who could resist such a spell? However, if the Ancient Mariner was the principal literary influence in the early development of Lovecraft’s taste for the weird, a searing personal event may have been as significant: the death, on 26 January 1896, of his maternal grandmother, Robie Alzada Place Phillips.

It was, perhaps, not so much the loss of a family member—to whom Lovecraft does not appear to have been especially close—as its effect upon the remaining members of the family that so affected the young boy:

the death of my grandmother plunged the household into a gloom from which it never fully recovered. The black attire of my mother & aunts terrified & repelled me to such an extent that I would surreptitiously pin bits of bright cloth or paper to their skirts for sheer relief. They had to make a careful survey of their attire before receiving callers or going out!

Seriocomically as Lovecraft narrates these events, twenty years after the fact, it is evident that they left a profound impression upon him. The aftermath was quite literally nightmarish:

And then it was that my former high spirits received their damper. I began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, peopled with things which I called ‘nightgaunts’—a compound word of my own coinage. I used to draw them after waking (perhaps the idea of these figures came from an edition de luxe of Paradise Lost with illustrations by Doré, which I discovered one day in the east parlor). In dreams they were wont to whirl me through space at a sickening rate of speed, the while fretting & impelling me with their detestable tridents. It is fully fifteen years—aye, more—since I have seen a ‘night-gaunt’, but even now, when half asleep & drifting vaguely along over a sea of childhood thoughts, I feel a thrill of fear … & instinctively struggle to keep awake. That was my own prayer back in ’96—each night—to keep awake & ward off the nightgaunts!²⁷

And so begins Lovecraft’s career as one of the great dreamers—or, to coin a term that must be coined for the phenomenon, nightmarers—of literary history. Even though it would be another ten years from the writing of this letter, and hence a full thirty years after these dreams, that he would utilize the night-gaunts in his work, it is already evident that his boyhood dreams contain many conceptual and imagistic kernels of his mature tales: the cosmic backdrop; the utterly outré nature of his malignant entities (in a late letter he describes them as ‘black, lean, rubbery things with bared, barbed tails, bat-wings, and no faces at all’²⁸), so different from conventional demons, vampires, or ghosts; and the helpless passivity of the protagonist-victim, at the mercy of forces infinitely more powerful than himself. It would, of course, take a long time for Lovecraft to evolve his theory and practice of weird fiction; but, with dreams like these at such an early age, his career as a writer of horror tales comes to seem like an inevitable destiny.

Lovecraft’s family—in particular his mother—must, however, have been concerned for his physical and psychological health at the onset of his dreams, and at what may have been a general pattern of gloomy or depressed behaviour. Lovecraft speaks frequently in later years of a trip to western Rhode Island taken in 1896, and it seems likely that this trip to ancestral lands was, at least in part, an attempt by his family to rid him of his nightmares and his general malaise.

In conformity with his carefree and rather unsupervised childhood, Lovecraft was allowed ready access to the ‘windowless third-story trunk-room’²⁹ at 454 Angell Street, where the family’s collection of eighteenth-century volumes—then considered outdated and of no contemporary relevance—was stored. Lovecraft took to them eagerly, particularly the volumes of poetry and belleslettres. This eighteenth-century predilection led indirectly to a literary and philosophical interest of still greater importance: classical antiquity. At the age of six Lovecraft read Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), and professed himself ‘enraptured by the Hellenic myths even in their Teutonised form’ (‘A Confession of Unfaith’). From Hawthorne Lovecraft naturally graduated to Thomas Bulfinch’s imperishable retelling of Graeco-Roman myths, The Age of Fable (1855).

Lovecraft finally came upon the ancients themselves around this time, doing so in a way that felicitously united his burgeoning love of classical myth with his already existing fondness for eighteenthcentury prosody. His grandfather’s library had an edition of ‘Garth’s Ovid’—that gorgeous 1717 translation of the Metamorphoses assembled by Sir Samuel Garth, and including contributions from such poets as Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Addison, and Gay. It is not surprising that ‘The even decasyllabic rhythm seemed to strike some responsive chord in my brain, and I forthwith became wedded to that measure.’³⁰

Whipple Phillips also assisted in fostering Lovecraft’s love of Rome: ‘He had loved to muse amidst the ruins of the ancient city, & had brought from Italy a wealth of mosaics, … paintings, & other objets d’art whose theme was more often classically Roman than Italian. He always wore a pair of mosaics in his cuffs for buttons— one a view of the Coliseum (so tiny yet so faithful); the other of the Forum.’³¹ The downstairs parlour of 454 Angell Street had a lifesize Roman bust on a gilded pedestal. No doubt all this was part of the reason why Lovecraft always preferred the culture of Rome to that of Greece, although other philosophical, aesthetic, and temperamental factors eventually entered into it.

In the short term the effect of reading Hawthorne, Bulfinch, and Garth’s Ovid was that ‘My Bagdad name and affiliations disappeared at once, for the magic of silks and colours faded before that of fragrant templed groves, faun-peopled meadows in the twilight, and the blue, beckoning Mediterranean’ (‘A Confession of Unfaith’). A more important result is that Lovecraft became a writer.

Lovecraft dates the commencement of his writing to the age of six, remarking: ‘My attempts at versification, of which I made the first at the age of six, now took on a crude, internally rhyming ballad metre, and I sang of the exploits of Gods and Heroes.’³² In context this appears to suggest that Lovecraft had begun to write verse prior to his discovery of classical antiquity, but that his fascination with the ancient world impelled him toward renewed poetic composition, this time on classical themes. None of this pre-classical verse survives, and the first poetical work we do have is the ‘second edition’ of ‘The Poem of Ulysses; or, The Odyssey: Written for Young People’. This elaborate little book is dated to 8 November 1897 in the preface, and we have to believe that the ‘first edition’ dated to earlier in the year, prior to Lovecraft’s seventh birthday on 20 August 1897.

On the copyright page Lovecraft writes: ‘Acknowledgements are due to Popes Odyssey and Bulfinch’s Mythology and Harpers Half Hour Series.’ Then, helpfully, ‘Homer first writ the poem.’ I have not been able to ascertain what the book in Harper’s Half Hour Series is; in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ Lovecraft describes it as a ‘tiny book in the private library of my elder aunt’ (i.e., Lillian D. Phillips). It is rather remarkable to think that Lovecraft had already read the whole of Pope’s Odyssey by the age of seven; but it becomes immediately obvious that in his eighty-eight-line poem he could not possibly have been dependent upon Pope’s fourteen-thousandline translation either metrically or even in terms of the story line. Here is how Lovecraft’s poem begins:

The nighte was darke! O readers, Hark!

And see Ulysses’ fleet!

From trumpets sound back homeward bound He hopes his spouse to greet

This is certainly not Pope; rather, the metre is clearly adapted from Coleridge’s Ancient MarinerAncient Mariner year-old “verse” was pretty bad, and I had recited enough poetry to know that it was so’; what helped him to improve his prosody was a very careful study of Abner Alden’s The Reader (1797), which he declares ‘was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence’.³³ After a month or so, he produced ‘The Poem of Ulysses’.

If nothing else, the work is a remarkable example of concision: in eighty-eight lines Lovecraft has compressed the twelve-thousand lines of Homer’s Odyssey. Lovecraft achieves this compression by deftly omitting relatively inessential portions of the story—in particular, the entire first four books (the Adventures of Telemachos) and, perhaps surprisingly, book eleven (the descent into Hades)— and, more importantly, by retelling the entire story in chronological sequence, from Odysseus’s sailing from Troy to his final return home to Ithaca, rather than in the elaborately convoluted way in which Homer’s Odysseus narrates his adventures.

According to various catalogues of works found at the rear of Lovecraft’s juvenile writings, Lovecraft wrote similar paraphrases of the Iliad and Aeneid, as well as items called ‘Mythology for the Young’ (perhaps a paraphrase of some of Bulfinch) and ‘An Old Egyptian Myth Prepared Specially for Small Children’ (again possibly drawn from Bulfinch, as chapter 34 of The Age of Fable discusses some Egyptian myths, especially that of Isis and Osiris).

Classical antiquity was, however, more than a literary experience for Lovecraft; it was both a personal and even a quasi-religious one. In 1897–99 he pored over the classical relics of the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design (the college situated at the foot of College Hill, mostly along Benefit Street), and shortly afterward became familiar with other classical art museums in Providence and Boston. The result was an infatuation with the classical world and then a kind of religious epiphany. Let Lovecraft tell it in his own inimitable way:

When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a halfsincere belief in the old gods and Nature-spirits. I have in literal truth built altars to Pan, Apollo, Diana, and Athena, and have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk. Once I firmly thought I beheld some of these sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks; a kind of ‘religious experience’ as true in its way as the subjective ecstasies of any Christian. If a Christian tell me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen the hoofed Pan and the sisters of the Hesperian Phaëthusa. (‘A Confession of Unfaith’)

This certainly puts the lie to Bulfinch, who solemnly declared at the very beginning of The Age of Fable: ‘The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. The so-called divinities of Olympus have not a single worshipper among living men.’

In writing the above passage Lovecraft was clearly wishing to show that his scepticism and anticlericalism were of very early origin; but he may be guilty of some exaggeration. Earlier in this essay he reports that ‘I was instructed in the legends of the Bible and of Saint Nicholas at the age of about two, and gave to both a passive acceptance not especially distinguished either for its critical keenness or its enthusiastic comprehension’. He then declares that just before the age of five he was told that Santa Claus does not exist, and that he thereupon countered with the query as to ‘why God is not equally a myth’. ‘Not long afterwards’, he continues, he was placed in a Sunday school at the First Baptist Church, but became so pestiferous an iconoclast that he was allowed to discontinue attendance. Elsewhere, however, he declares that this incident occurred at the age of twelve. When we examine Lovecraft’s philosophical development, the likelihood is that the Sunday school incident indeed took place at the age of twelve, and not at five.

By the age of seven Lovecraft had already begun to read, begun to write poetry and prose nonfiction, and gained what would prove to be a lifelong love of England and of the past. But his imaginative appetite was not complete; for he claims that in the winter of 1896 yet another interest emerged: the theatre. The first play he saw was ’one of Denman Thompson’s minor efforts’,³⁴ The Sunshine of Paradise Alley, which featured a slum scene that fascinated him. Shortly thereafter he was enjoying the ‘well-made’ plays of Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero; but the next year his taste was improved by seeing his first Shakespearian play, Cymbeline, at the Providence Opera House. He set up a little toy theatre in his room, hand-painted the scenery, and played Cymbeline for weeks. Lovecraft’s interest in drama continued sporadically for at least the next fifteen to twenty years; around 1910 he saw Robert Mantell’s company perform King John in Providence, with the young Fritz Leiber, Sr, as Faulconbridge. Lovecraft was also a very early enthusiast of film, and throughout his life we will find selected films influencing some of his most significant writing.

From the age of three onward—while his father was slowly deteriorating both physically and mentally in Butler Hospital—the young Howard Phillips Lovecraft was encountering one intellectual and imaginative stimulus after the other: first the colonial antiquities of Providence, then Grimm’s Fairy Tales, then the Arabian Nights, then Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, then eighteenthcentury belles-lettres, then the theatre and Shakespeare, and finally Hawthorne, Bulfinch, and the classical world. It is a remarkable sequence, and many of these stimuli would be of lifelong duration. But there remained one further influence that would definitively turn Lovecraft into the man and writer we know: ‘Then I struck EDGAR ALLAN POE!! It was my downfall, and at the age of eight I saw the blue firmament of Argos and Sicily darkened by the miasmal exhalations of the tomb!’³⁵

CHAPTER THREE

Black Woods and Unfathomed Caves (1898–1902)

Lovecraft dates his first work of prose fiction to 1897,¹ and elsewhere identifies it as ‘The Noble Eavesdropper’, about which all we know is that it concerned ‘a boy who overheard some horrible conclave of subterranean beings in a cave’.² As the work does not survive, it would be idle to point to any literary sources for it; but the influence of the Arabian Nights (the cave of Ali Baba and other stories involving caves) might be conjectured. A still more likely source, perhaps, would be his grandfather Whipple, the only member of his family who appears to have enjoyed the weird. As Lovecraft states in a late letter:

I never heard oral weird tales except from my grandfather— who, observing my tastes in reading, used to devise all sorts of impromptu original yarns about black woods, unfathomed caves, winged horrors (like the ‘night-gaunts’ of my dreams, about which I used to tell him), old witches with sinister cauldrons, & ‘deep, low, moaning sounds’. He obviously drew most of his imagery from the early gothic romances—Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, &c.—which he seemed to like better than Poe or other later fantaisistes.³

Here are some of the components (unfathomed caves, deep, low, moaning sounds) of the imagery of ‘The Noble Eavesdropper’. But Lovecraft admits that this is the only tale he wrote prior to his reading of Poe.

Poe was, by the turn of the century, slowly gaining a place of eminence in American literature, although he still had to face posthumous attacks by Henry James and others. His championing by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and other European writers had slowly impelled reconsideration of his work by English and American critics.

I do not know which edition of Poe was read by the eight-yearold Lovecraft; it must have been some school edition. It is, in fact, a little difficult to discern any clear-cut Poe influence in the first several of Lovecraft’s surviving juvenile stories—‘The Little Glass Bottle’, ‘The Secret Cave; or, John Lees Adventure’, ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard; or, A Dead Man’s Revenge’, and ‘The Mysterious Ship’. None of these early stories is dated, with the exception of ‘The Mysterious Ship’ (clearly dated to 1902), but they must have been written during the period 1898–1902, perhaps more toward the earlier than the later end of that spectrum. Perhaps the only tale of genuine interest is ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard’—which contains not only a subtitle (‘or, “A Dead Man’s Revenge”) but a sub-subtitle (‘A Detective story’). This is the longest of Lovecraft’s juvenile stories, and at the end of the autograph manuscript he has noted (obviously at a much later date): ‘Evidently written in late 1898 or early 1899’. The fact that it is labelled a detective story should not lead us to think it is influenced by Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ or any of his other detective stories, although no doubt Lovecraft read them. Even the most cursory glance at this wild, histrionic, and rather engaging story should allow us to point to its predominant source: the dime novel.

The first dime novel was published in 1860, when the firm later known as Beadle & Adams reprinted, in a 128-page paper-covered volume 6 by 4 inches in dimensions, a novel by Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens. The fact that it was a reprint was critical, for it allowed the firm to claim that here was a ‘dollar book for a dime’.⁴ Beadle & Adams was the leading publisher of dime novels until it folded in 1898, having been driven out of business by the bold and innovative publishing practices of Street & Smith, which entered the dime novel market in 1889.

It should not be assumed that dime novels were merely action thrillers, although many of them were; there were westerns (Deadwood Dick from Beadle & Adams; Diamond Dick from Street & Smith), detective or espionage stories (Nick Carter from Street & Smith; Old King Brady from Frank Tousey), tales of high school and college life (Frank Merriwell from Street & Smith), and even pious tales of moral uprightness (Horatio Alger, Jr, wrote prolifically for Street & Smith in the 1890s). Their principal features were their price, their format (paper covers, 128 pages or less), and, in general, their action-packed narrative style. The leading dime novel series were, of course, priced at 10 cents, although there was a wide array of smaller books, called ‘nickel libraries’, at 5 cents aimed at younger readers.

It is one of the great paradoxes of Lovecraft’s entire literary career that he could, on the one hand, absorb the highest aesthetic fruits of Western culture—Greek and Latin literature, Shakespeare, the poetry of Keats and Shelley—and at the same time go slumming in the cheapest dregs of popular fiction. Throughout his life Lovecraft vigorously defended the literary value of the weird tale (unlike some modern critics who misguidedly vaunt both the good and the bad, the aesthetically polished and the mechanically hackneyed, as representative of ‘popular culture’—as if there is any merit to what masses of half-literate people like to read), and he adamantly, and rightly, refused to consider the weird work found in dime novels and pulp magazines as genuine literature; but this did not prevent him from voraciously lapping up these lesser products. Lovecraft knew that he was reading trash, but he read it anyway.

Among the dime novel series Lovecraft admits to reading were Pluck and Luck (Tousey, 1898f.), Brave and Bold (Street & Smith, 1903f.), Frank Reade (Tousey, 1892–98, 1903f.), Jesse James Stories (Street & Smith, 1901f.), Nick Carter (Street & Smith, 1886f.), and Old King Brady (featured first in the New York Detective Library (Tousey, 1885–99), then, along with his son Young King Brady, in Secret Service (1899–1912)).

Old King Brady may be the most interesting of the lot for our purposes, since the hero of ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard’ is one King John, described as ‘a famous western detective’. Old King Brady was not a western character, but he was a detective. Moreover, Beadle had a series detective, Prince John (written by Joseph E. Badger, Jr), in the early 1890s. I do not know whether King John—even in terms of his name—is some sort of fusion of Old King Brady and Prince John, but he is certainly a dime novel detective.

And ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard’ is a miniature dime novel, pure and simple. The action is nothing if not fast-paced. In twelve relatively short chapters (some as little as fifty words in length) we read a lurid story involving kidnapping, a trap-door in a tomb, and other flamboyant details. King John not only solves the mystery but ends up marrying the kidnapped woman.

‘The Mysterious Ship’ is the latest of the surviving juvenilia, and by far the most disappointing. This story—consisting of nine very brief chapters, some as short as twenty-five words and none longer than seventy-five words—is so dry and clipped that it led L. Sprague de Camp to think it ‘an outline rather than a story’.⁵ This seems unlikely given the elaborate ‘publishing’ procedures Lovecraft has undertaken for this work. In the first place, we here encounter Lovecraft’s first surviving typescript, a text of twelve pages enclosed in a little booklet. This could not have been typed on the 1906 Remington that served Lovecraft for the rest of his life, but must have been some similar behemoth belonging to his grandfather or perhaps even his father. Moreover, there is a sort of gauze cloth cover with a drawing of a ship in pen on it, and another drawing of a ship on the back cover. The imprint on the title page is ‘The Royal Press. 1902’. It is obvious that Lovecraft is aiming for a sort of dramatic terseness in this narrative; but the result is mere confusion as to what exactly happens.

Aside from discovering Poe and giving his fledgling fictional career a boost, Lovecraft also found himself in 1898 fascinated with science. This is the third component of what he once described as his tripartite nature: love of the strange and fantastic, love of the ancient and permanent, and love of abstract truth and scientific logic.⁶ It is perhaps not unusual that it would be the last to emerge in his young mind, and it is still remarkable that it emerged so early and was embraced so vigorously. Lovecraft first came upon a section devoted to ‘Philosophical and Scientific Instruments’ at the back of Webster’s Dictionary, and very shortly thereafter he had a full-fledged chemistry set and was deep in experimentation. As with his enthusiasm for the Arabian Nights, his chemical tastes led his family to indulge the boy in whatever tools he needed. The first book he read on the subject was The Young Chemist (1876) by John Howard Appleton, a professor of chemistry at Brown University and a friend of the family.

The immediate result of the discovery of science was a spate of literary work. Lovecraft began The Scientific Gazette on 4 March 1899. This first issue—a single sheet—still survives; it contains an amusing report: ‘There was a great explosion in the Providence Laboratory this afternoon. While experimenting some potassium blew up causing great damage to everyone.’ Incredibly, this magazine was initially a daily, but ‘it soon degenerated into a weekly’.⁷ No subsequent issues survive until the New Issue Vol. I, No. 1 (12 May 1902), and I shall postpone discussion of it until the next chapter.

Lovecraft also wrote a number of short chemical treatises. There was a six-volume series with the general title Chemistry, of which four volumes survive: Chemistry (10 cents); Chemistry, Magic, & Electricity (5 cents); Chemistry III (5 cents); and Chemistry IV (15 cents). These volumes discuss such things as argon, gunpowder, a carbon cell battery, gases, acids, tellurium, lithium, explosives, ‘explosive experiments’, and the like. There is also a small work called A Good Anaesthetic (5 cents). Judging by the handwriting, these works probably all date to around 1899. Non-extant works include Iron Working (5 cents), Acids (5 cents), Explosives (5 cents), and Static Electricity (10 cents).

It appears that Lovecraft’s early scientific interests engendered some practical experimentation, if the following account—related to W. Paul Cook by one of Lovecraft’s neighbours—dates to this period. It is one of the most delightful and celebrated anecdotes about Lovecraft that has come down to us. Let Cook tell it in his own inimitable way:

That section [of Providence, in which Lovecraft lived] was then open fields, rather swampy here and there, with very few houses. One day this neighbor, Mrs. Winslow Church, noticed that someone had started a grass fire that had burned over quite an area and was approaching her property. She went out to investigate and found the little Lovecraft boy. She scolded him for setting such a big fire and maybe endangering other peoples’ property. He said very positively, ‘I wasn’t setting a big fire. I wanted to make a fire one foot by one foot.’ That is the little story in the words in which it came to me. It means little except that it shows a passion for exactitude (in keeping with him as we knew him later)—but it is a story of Lovecraft.⁸

This anecdote is, as I say, not dated; but the mention of ‘open fields’ suggests that it occurred while Lovecraft was at 454 Angell Street, since the area was already being built up during his early teenage years.

Another rather anomalous discovery Lovecraft made at this time was anatomy—or, rather, the specific facts of anatomy relating to sex. Here is his account of it:

In the matter of the justly celebrated ‘facts of life’ I didn’t wait for oral information, but exhausted the entire subject in the medical section of the family library (to which I had access, although I wasn’t especially loquacious about this side of my reading) when I was 8 years old—through Quain’s Anatomy (fully illustrated & diagrammed), Dunglison’s Physiology, &c. &c. This was because of curiosity & perplexity concerning the strange reticences & embarrassments of adult speech, & the oddly inexplicable allusions & situations in standard literature. The result was the very opposite of what parents generally fear—for instead of giving me an abnormal & precocious interest in sex (as unsatisfied curiosity might have done), it virtually killed my interest in the subject. The whole matter was reduced to prosaic mechanism—a mechanism which I rather despised or at least thought nonglamourous because of its purely animal nature & separation from such things as intellect & beauty—& all the drama was taken out of it.⁹

This is an intensely interesting statement. First, when Lovecraft says that he did not wait for ‘oral information’, he is suggesting (perhaps without even knowing it) that his mother would certainly not have told him the ‘facts of life’—at least not at the age of eight, and perhaps not at any age. Even his grandfather might not have done so. It is remarkable to note that Lovecraft was already so keenly aware of the ‘strange reticences & embarrassments of adult speech’ at this time that he sensed something was not being told him; at least up to the age of eight, and perhaps beyond, he was a solitary child who largely spent time in the company of adults. And as one who was already a prolific reader (and a reader of material rarely given to the very young), he may have become early aware of anomalies in some of his books also. And as for his declaration that his knowledge of the matter killed his interest in sex: this is certainly the impression Lovecraft consistently conveyed to his friends, correspondents, and even his wife. He does not seem to have had any romantic involvements in high school or at any time prior to about 1918 (and even this one is a matter of inference). It took three years for Sonia Greene to convince Lovecraft to marry her; the impetus was clearly on her side. There has been much speculation on Lovecraft’s sex life, but I do not believe there are sufficient grounds for much of an opinion beyond the testimony given by Lovecraft himself—and his wife.

In any event, Lovecraft’s initial enthusiasm for chemistry and physiology would lead to further interests in geography, geology, astronomy, anthropology, psychology, and other sciences that he would study over a lifetime. He may have remained a layman in all these branches of knowledge, but his absorption of many of them—especially astronomy—was prodigious for a literary man; and they helped to lay strong foundations for his philosophical thought, and would provide the backbone for some of his most powerful works of fiction.

Lovecraft reports that he began learning Latin around 1898.¹⁰

Elsewhere he says that ‘My grandfather had previously [i.e., previous to his entering school] taught me a great deal of Latin’,¹¹

which suggests that he had begun the study of Latin prior to his attendance at the Slater Avenue School in the fall of 1898. It was natural for a boy so enthralled with the classical world to learn Latin, although to have begun it so early—and, evidently, to have mastered it in a few years, without much formal instruction—was a notable feat even at a time when knowledge of Latin was far commoner than it is now.

We will find that the poetry of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal left a lasting impression upon Lovecraft, and that the Epicurean philosophy embodied in Lucretius was a central influence in his early thought. One remarkable instance of the classical influence on Lovecraft’s juvenile writing is the piece entitled ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’.

This 116-line work is nothing less than a literal pentameter verse translation of the first eighty-eight lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The date of composition of this piece is, unfortunately, in doubt; but, by consulting the various catalogues of works found in his other juvenile works, one may infer that it dates to the period 1900–02.

The first thing to note about this translation is how different it is from Dryden’s (he translated the first book of the Metamorphoses in ‘Garth’s Ovid’). Lovecraft attempts a far more literal, line-for-line translation, adhering as closely to the Latin as he can. Lovecraft has two subdivisions in his essay, with the headings ‘The Creation of the World’ (ll. 5–84) and ‘The Creation of Man’ (ll. 85–116). There are, admittedly, similar divisions and headings in Dryden, but his first one (‘The Golden Age’) appears just where Lovecraft’s poem leaves off.

There is one more remarkable thing about ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, and that is the possibility that it may be a fragment. The autograph manuscript covers five sheets, and the text proceeds to the very bottom of the fifth sheet. Could Lovecraft have translated more of Ovid’s text, and could this portion have been lost? I think the probability is strong: this item, priced at 25 cents, is currently not much longer than ‘The Poem of Ulysses’, priced at 5 cents. Perhaps it is not unreasonable to think that Lovecraft might have translated the entire first book of Ovid (779 lines in Latin). The translation as it stands admittedly ends at a clear break in the Latin text, as at line 89 Ovid is about to begin the account of the four ages of man; but I still believe there was once more to this work than we have.

The year 1898 was certainly an eventful one for Lovecraft: he discovered Poe and science, and began learning Latin; he first began attendance at school; and he had his first nervous breakdown. In a late letter he refers to it as a ‘near-breakdown’;¹² I have no idea what that means. Another ‘near-breakdown’ occurred in 1900. There certainly does not seem to have been anything physically wrong with the boy, and there is no record of his admission into a hospital. The history and nature of Lovecraft’s early nervous condition are very vexed issues, largely because we have only his words on the matter, most of them written many years after the fact.

Lovecraft reports that ‘I didn’t inherit a very good set of nerves, since near relatives on both sides of my ancestry were prone to headaches, nerve-exhaustion, and breakdowns’. He goes on to cite the case of his grandfather (who had ‘frightful blind headaches’), his mother (who ‘could run him a close second’), and his father. Then he adds: ‘My own headaches and nervous irritability and exhaustion-tendency began as early as my existence itself—I, too, was an early bottle baby with unexplained miseries and meagre nutriment-assimilative capacities.’¹³ Early weaning was common practice at the turn of the century and for a long time thereafter; but Lovecraft’s remark suggests that his weaning occurred even earlier than was the custom.

One remarkable admission Lovecraft made late in life was as follows: ‘My own nervous state in childhood once produced a tendency inclining toward chorea, although not quite attaining that level. My face was full of unconscious & involuntary motions now & then—& the more I was urged to stop them, the more frequent they became.’¹⁴ Lovecraft does not exactly date these chorea-like attacks, but context suggests that they occurred before the age of ten. All this led J. Vernon Shea to suspect that Lovecraft might actually have had chorea minor, a nervous ailment that ‘manifests itself in uncontrollable facial tics and grimaces’ but gradually dissipates by puberty.¹⁵ Certainty on the matter is, of course, impossible, but I think the probability of this conjecture is strong. And although Lovecraft maintains in the above letter that ‘in time the tendency died down’ and that his entrance into high school ‘caused me to reform’, I shall have occasion to refer to possible recurrences of these chorea-like symptoms at various periods in Lovecraft’s life, even into maturity.

If, then, it is true that Lovecraft suffered some sort of ‘nearbreakdown’ in 1898, it seems very likely that the death of his father on 19 July 1898 had much to do with it. The effect on his mother can only be imagined. It may be well, then, to summarize the relations between Lovecraft and his mother up to this time, as best we can piece them together.

There is no question but that his mother both spoiled Lovecraft and was overprotective of him. This latter trait appears to have developed even before Winfield’s hospitalization in 1893. Winfield Townley Scott tells the following story:

On their summer vacations at Dudley, Massachusetts …, Mrs. Lovecraft refused to eat her dinner in the dining room, not to leave her sleeping son alone for an hour one floor above. When a diminutive teacher-friend, Miss Ella Sweeney, took the rather rangy youngster to walk, holding his hand, she was enjoined by Howard’s mother to stoop a little lest she pull the boy’s arm from its socket. When Howard pedaled his tricycle along Angell Street, his mother trooped beside him, a guarding hand upon his shoulder.¹⁶

Lovecraft admits that ‘My array of toys, books, and other youthful pleasures was virtually unlimited’¹⁷ at this time; whatever he wanted, he seems to have got.

At this point it may be well to mention a remarkable bit of testimony provided by Lovecraft’s wife. In her 1948 memoir Sonia H. Davis states the following:

It was … at that time the fashion for mothers to start ‘hopechests’ for their daughters even before they were born, so that when Mrs. Winfield Scott Lovecraft was expecting her first child she had hoped it would be a girl; nor was this curtailed at the birth of her boy. So this hope-chest was gradually growing; some day to be given to Howard’s wife … As a baby Howard looked like a beautiful little girl. He had, at the tender age of three years, a head of flaxen curls of which any girl would have been proud … These he wore until he was about six. When at last he protested and wanted them cut off, his mother had taken him to the barber’s and cried bitterly as the ‘cruel’ shears separated them from his head.¹⁸

I suppose one must accept this statement for the most part, although I think rather too much has been made of it—and also of the apparent fact that Susie dressed her son in frocks at an early age. The celebrated 1892 photograph of Lovecraft and his parents shows him with the curls and the frock, as does another picture probably taken around the same time.¹⁹ Lovecraft remarks on the curls himself, saying that it was this ‘golden mane’ that partly led Louise Imogen Guiney to name him ‘Little Sunshine’.²⁰ But another photograph of Lovecraft, probably taken at the age of seven or eight,²¹ shows him as a perfectly normal boy with short hair and boy’s attire. In fact, it cannot be ascertained when Susie ceased to dress Lovecraft in frocks; but even if she had persisted up to the age of four, it would not have been especially unusual.

There are two other pieces of evidence one can adduce here, although their purport is not entirely clear. R. H. Barlow, in his jottings about Lovecraft (mostly taken down in 1934 but some made evidently later), writes: ‘Mrs. Gamwell’s stories of how HPL for a while insisted “I’m a little girl.”’²² Annie Gamwell could not have made this observation later than early 1897, as that was when she married and moved out of 454 Angell Street; and the context of Barlow’s remark (he adds the detail of how Lovecraft would spout Tennyson from the table-top) could date the event to as early as 1893. Then there is a letter from Whipple Phillips to Lovecraft, dated 19 June 1894: ‘I will tell you more about what I have seen when I get home if you are a good boy and wear trousers.’²³ Whipple has underscored the last two words. The implication is, I suppose, that Lovecraft at this time was not fond of wearing trousers.

In spite of the above, I see little evidence of gender confusion in Lovecraft’s later life; if anything, he displayed quick and unwavering prejudice against ‘sissies’ and homosexuals. Susie may have wanted a girl, and may have attempted to preserve the illusion for a few years, but Lovecraft even in youth was headstrong and made it evident that he was a boy with a boy’s normal interests. It was, after all, he who wanted his flowing curls cut off at the age of six.

In addition to being oversolicitous of her son, Susie also attempted to mould him in ways which he found either irritating or repugnant. Around 1898 she tried to enrol him in a children’s dancing class; Lovecraft ‘abhorred the thought’ and, fresh from an initial study of Latin, responded with a line from Cicero: ’Nemo fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit!’ (‘Scarcely any sober person dances, unless by chance he is insane’).²⁴ Evidently Lovecraft had developed a certain skill in getting his own way, for—like his initial Sunday school attendance (probably the previous year), which he was allowed to forgo—he evidently escaped the dancing lessons. But what he did not escape were violin lessons, which lasted a full two years, between the ages of seven and nine. These lessons were, however, initially at his own insistence:

My rhythmic tendencies led me into a love of melody, and I was forever whistling & humming in defiance of convention & good breeding. I was so exact in time & tune, & showed such a semi-professional precision & flourish in my crude attempts, that my plea for a violin was granted when I was seven years of age, & I was placed under the instruction of the best violin teacher for children in the city—Mrs. Wilhelm Nauck. For two years I made such progress that Mrs. Nauck was enthusiastic, & declared that I should adopt music as a career—BUT, all this time the tedium of practising had been wearing shockingly on my always sensitive nervous system. My ‘career’ extended until 1899, its summit being a public recital at which I played a solo from Mozart before an audience of considerable size. Soon after that, my ambition & taste alike collapsed like a house of cards … I began to detest classical music, because it had meant so much painful labour to me; & I positively loathed the violin! Our physician, knowing my temperament, advised an immediate discontinuance of music lessons, which speedily ensued.²⁵

One would like to date Lovecraft’s second ‘near-breakdown’ to the termination of these lessons, but he clearly asserts that the first occurred in 1898 and the second in 1900. In any event, Lovecraft manifestly continued to be under considerable nervous strain—a situation in part relieved and in part augmented by his first attempt at school attendance, from which he was withdrawn after a year’s term (1898–99). Indeed, his casual remark in 1929 that ‘I spent the summer of 1899 with my mother’²⁶ in Westminster, Massachusetts, must lead one to speculate on the purpose of such a trip, and to wonder whether health reasons were a factor. I am inclined to connect the trip with the trauma of his first year of school and also of his violin lessons, which probably ended in the summer of 1899.

From all that has gone before it will be evident that Lovecraft led a comparatively solitary young childhood, with only his adult family members as his companions. Many of his childhood activities— reading, writing, scientific work, practising music, even attending the theatre—are primarily or exclusively solitary, and we do not hear much about any boyhood friends until his entrance into grade school. All his letters discussing his childhood stress his relative isolation and loneliness:

You will notice that I have made no reference to childish friends & playmates—I had none! The children I knew disliked me, & I disliked them. I was used to adult company & conversation, & despite the fact that I felt shamefully dull beside my elders, I had nothing in common with the infant train. Their romping & shouting puzzled me. I hated mere play & dancing about—in my relaxations I always desired plot.²⁷

One confirmation of this comes from the recollections of Lovecraft’s second cousin Ethel M. Phillips (1888–1987), later Mrs Ethel Phillips Morrish. Ethel, two years older than Lovecraft, was living with her parents Jeremiah W. Phillips (the son of Whipple’s brother James Wheaton Phillips) and his wife Abby in various suburbs of Providence during the 1890s, and was sent over to play with young Howard. She confessed in an interview conducted in 1977 that she did not much care for her cousin, finding him eccentric and aloof. She was particularly vexed because Lovecraft did not know how a swing worked. But she does have a delightful image of Lovecraft, at about the age of four, turning the pages of some monstrously huge book in a very solemn and adult manner.²⁸ Lovecraft provides one remarkable glimpse of some of the solitary games he played as a young boy:

My favourite toys were very small ones, which would permit of their arrangement in widely extensive scenes. My mode of play was to devote an entire table-top to a scene, which I would proceed to develop as a broad landscape … helped by occasional trays of earth or clay. I had all sorts of toy villages with small wooden or cardboard houses, & by combining several of them would often construct cities of considerable extent & intricacy … Toy trees—of which I had an infinite number—were used with varying effect to form parts of the landscape . . . even forests (or the suggested edges of forests). Certain kinds of blocks made walls & hedges, & I also used blocks in constructing large public buildings … My people were mainly of the lead-soldier type & magnitude—frankly too large for the buildings which they presumably tenanted, but as small as I could get. I accepted some as they were, but had my mother modify many in costume with the aid of knife & paint-brush. Much piquancy was added to my scenes by special toy buildings like windmills, castles, &c.

But there was more to it than just a static landscape; with his inveterate feel for plot, and his already developing sense of time, history, and pageantry, Lovecraft would actually act out historical scenarios with his miniature cities. He adds significantly: ‘Horrorplots were frequent, though (oddly enough) I never attempted to construct fantastic or extra-terrestrial scenes. I was too much of an innate realist to care for fantasy in its purest form.’²⁹ Lovecraft does not give an explicit date for the commencement of this fascinating exercise, but I suspect it dates to his seventh or eighth birthday.

Although Lovecraft may have been solitary, he was by no means devoted merely to indoor activities. The year 1900 saw the commencement of his career as bicyclist, something he would keep up for more than a decade. Late in life he claimed that he was a ‘veritable bike-centaur’ at this time.³⁰

Lovecraft’s attendance at the Slater Avenue School (formerly located at the northeast corner of Slater Avenue and University Avenue, where St Dunstan’s Prep School now stands) changed all this, at least to some degree. He entered the for the first time in 1898, at the ‘highest grade of primary school’³¹ (presumably the fourth or fifth grade), but apparently withdrew at the end of the term in 1899.

Lovecraft does not seem to have returned to Slater Avenue until the 1902–03 school year. During the interim he was, as before, left to satisfy his intellectual curiosity in his own way: his family could hardly have failed to see that the boy was naturally bookish and did not need much incentive to investigate any subject that caught his fancy.

Lovecraft states that he discovered W. Frank Russell’s The Frozen Pirate (1887), a lurid and histrionic novel about Antarctica, at the age of eight or nine, and that it impelled him to write some weird tales based on the same theme. It seems likely that this novel— along, perhaps, with the scarcely less histrionic but more artistically finished Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe— helped to inspire Lovecraft’s interest in geography, particularly the Antarctic, an interest that led not merely to several works of fiction both early and late but several works of nonfiction as well.

Lovecraft on various occasions states that his interest in Antarctica began either in 1900 or in 1902. I am inclined to accept the earlier date, for in an early letter he goes on to say: ‘The Borchgrevink expedition, which had just made a new record in South Polar achievement, greatly stimulated this study.’³² The Norwegian Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink’s great achievement was to have established the first camp on actual Antarctic soil. He had sailed from England in August 1898, established the camp in February 1899, stayed all through the long Antarctic night (May– July 1899), walked on the Ross Ice Shelf on 19 February 1900, and returned to England in the summer of 1900.

It is not surprising that Lovecraft’s interest would have been aroused by the Borchgrevink expedition, for this was the first important Antarctic voyage since the 1840s. It is also for this reason that two of the three lost treatises on Antarctic exploration which Lovecraft wrote around this time—Voyages of Capt. Ross, R.N. (1902), Wilkes’s Explorations (1902), and Antarctic Atlas (1903)³³—discuss those 1840s expeditions: there were no others in recent memory that he could have written about. In fact, I am wondering whether the dates of writing supplied (in 1936) by Lovecraft are entirely accurate: I would like to date them to an even earlier period, say 1900. The first two of these treatises must have treated the nearly simultaneous expeditions of the American Charles Wilkes (1838– 40), who named the continent, and the Englishman James Clark Ross (1839–41), for whom the Ross Ice Shelf is named.

It would seem odd for Lovecraft not to have chosen to write up the expeditions by Borchgrevink and also Robert Scott (1901–02), so fresh as they would have been in his mind, rather than the expeditions of the 1840s, some of whose discoveries had been superseded by the work of these later explorers. His correspondent C. L. Moore actually saw a copy of Wilkes’s Explorations in late 1936,³⁴ although it was not found among his papers after his death a few months later. Antarctic Atlas must have been an interesting work, and presumably consisted largely of a map of the continent; but so little exploration of the land mass had been done by this time that large parts of it were still unknown and unnamed.

Lovecraft reports in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ that ‘my pompous “book” called Poemata Minora, written when I was eleven, was dedicated “To the Gods, Heroes, and Ideals of the Ancients”, and harped in disillusioned, world-weary tones on the sorrow of the pagan robbed of his antique pantheon’. Poemata Minora, Volume II is Lovecraft’s most finished and aesthetically satisfying juvenile work. The five poems bear comparison with any of his later verse, although this is an indication not so much of the merit of these early poems as of the mediocrity of his later ones.

The poems in Poemata Minora reveal considerable originality, and few can be traced to any specific works of classical poetry. Lovecraft was endlessly fond of citing the fourth and final stanza of ‘Ode to Selene or Diana’ as prototypical of his disharmony with the modern age:

Take heed, Diana, of my humble plea.

Convey me where my happiness may last. Draw me against the tide of time’s rough sea And let my spirit rest amid the past.

Poemata Minora, Volume II is a pleasing little product, fully worth the 25 cents Lovecraft was charging. Volume I is likely to have been equally substantial, as an ad in Volume II offers it for 25 cents also. But this was, for the time being, the final product of Lovecraft’s classicism. Although he would continue to draw upon the ancients for aesthetic and even philosophical inspiration, a new interest would for a time eclipse all others and impel an overhauling of his entire world view. For it was in the winter of 1902–03 that Lovecraft discovered astronomy.

CHAPTER FOUR

What of Unknown Africa? (1902–1908)

The most poignant sensations of my existence are those of 1896, when I discovered the Hellenic world, and of 1902, when I discovered the myriad suns and worlds of infinite space. Sometimes I think the latter event the greater, for the grandeur of that growing conception of the universe still excites a thrill hardly to be duplicated. I made of astronomy my principal scientific study, obtaining larger and larger telescopes, collecting astronomical books to the number of 61, and writing copiously on the subject in the form of special and monthly articles in the local press. (‘A Confession of Unfaith’)

This remark, made around 1921, is a sufficient indication of the degree to which the discovery of astronomy affected Lovecraft’s entire world view. I shall pursue the philosophical ramifications of his astronomical studies later; here it is worth examining how he came upon the science and what immediate literary products it engendered. In the winter of 1902 Lovecraft was attending the Slater Avenue School, but his statements lead one to believe that he stumbled upon astronomy largely of his own accord. The majority of his astronomy volumes were inherited from his maternal grandmother Robie Phillips’s collection; some of these are rather old and elementary school manuals dating to the 1870s or 1880s. These books are too old to have been used at Slater Avenue or at Hope Street High School (Lovecraft did not, in any event, take astronomy courses at Hope Street, even though they were offered), and some at least must have come from Robie’s library.

As with so many of his other early interests, Lovecraft’s family was very obliging in supply the materials necessary for his pursuit of astronomy. He acquired three successive telescopes, the last being a Bardon 3-inch from Montgomery Ward, costing $50.00. He still had this telescope in 1936. His new enthusiasm led quickly to writing—in this case, to an unprecedented quantity of writing. He does not seem to have commenced astronomical writing until the late summer of 1903, but when he did, he did so with gusto.

Among the treatises Lovecraft produced around this time is ‘The Science Library’, a nine-volume series probably written in 1903 or 1904, mostly dealing with the moon and planets. He also began issuing several different periodicals, including Astronomy and The Monthly Almanack; a good many of these were reproduced using a process called the hectograph (or hektograph). This was a sheet of gelatin in a pan rendered hard by glycerine. A master page is prepared either in written form by the use of special hectograph inks or in typed form using hectograph typewriter ribbon; artwork of all sorts could also be drawn upon it. The surface of the pan would then be moistened and the master page pressed down upon it; this page would then be removed and sheets of paper would be pressed upon the gelatin surface, which had now picked up whatever writing or art had been on the master. The surface would be good for up to fifty copies, at which time the impression would begin to fade. Different colours could also be used.¹ Lovecraft must have had more than one such pan, since no more than one page could be hectographed in a day, as the inks must be given time to settle to the bottom. Although the hectograph was a relatively inexpensive reproductive process, the sheer quantity of work Lovecraft was running off must have come to no small expense— inks, carbon paper, gelatin, pans, and the like. No doubt his mother and grandfather were happy to foot the bill, given the precocity and enthusiasm Lovecraft must have exhibited.

We can now finally come to the most significant of Lovecraft’s astronomical periodicals, The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy. Even Lovecraft, with his seemingly boundless energy, must have had difficulty writing his other juvenile treatises and periodicals while the weekly deadline of the Rhode Island Journal continually impended. The journal was issued first weekly, then monthly; the following issues (a total of sixty-nine) survive:

2 August 1903–31 January 1904 (Volume I)

16 April 1905–12 November 1905 (Volume III). January 1906–April 1907.

There are also two anomalously late issues, January and February 1909. Lovecraft states that the journal ‘was printed in editions of 15 to 25 on the hectograph’.² At the moment I wish to study only the issues of 1903–04.

An average issue would contain a number of different columns, features, and charts, along with news notes, advertisements (for works by Lovecraft, for items from his collection, and for outside merchants or friends), and fillers. They make wholly entertaining reading. A number of serials ran successively over several issues.

The issue for 1 November 1903 makes an interesting announcement: ’The Ladd Observatory Visited by a Correspondent Last Night.’ The correspondent, of course, is Lovecraft. The Ladd Observatory, situated on Doyle Avenue off Hope Street, is a charming observatory operated by Brown University; the fact that a thirteenyear-old boy who was not even attending school at the time was allowed to use this facility is a testament to the degree of expertise Lovecraft had gained in astronomy, largely on his own. He states that ‘The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college observatory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle’.³ Winslow Upton (1853– 1914) was a respected astronomer whose Star Atlas (1896), and probably other volumes, Lovecraft owned. One wonders whether he was a friend of Dr Franklin Chase Clark, who had married Lovecraft’s aunt Lillian in 1902.

Incredibly, while producing The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy every Sunday, issuing other occasional weekly or monthly magazines, and writing separate treatises, Lovecraft resumed his chemical journal, The Scientific Gazette. As I have mentioned, after the first issue (4 March 1899) we have no issue until 12 May 1902; after this there are no more issues for more than a year, but by the issue of 16 August 1903 Lovecraft was ready to resume this journal as a weekly, doing so quite regularly until 31 January 1904, with sundry extra issues. Counting the issues for 1899 and 1902, there are a total of thirty-two surviving numbers. No doubt this was printed on the hectograph like the Rhode Island Journal (the very earliest issues, of 1899 and following, were printed in an ‘edition’ of ‘one copy for family circulation’⁴). The journal strayed from its chemical focus pretty early on in the 1903 sequence, discussing such matters as Venus’s rotation, how to construct a camera obscura, perpetual motion, telescopes (a series taken over from the Rhode Island Journal and later to return there), microscopy, and the like.

These scientific interests also manifested themselves in fictional composition. Lovecraft admits to being a ‘Verne enthusiast’ and that ‘many of my tales showed the literary influence of the immortal Jules’. He goes on to say: ‘I wrote one story about that side of the moon which is forever turned away from us—using, for fictional purposes, the Hansen theory that air and water still exist there as the result of an abnormal centre of gravity in the moon.’⁵ This would presumably qualify, if it survived, as Lovecraft’s first authentic tale of science fiction.

I have mentioned that Lovecraft was writing most of these scientific treatises and journals while not in school. He attended the Slater Avenue school in 1898–99, but was then withdrawn; he resumed schooling there for the 1902–03 school year, and was withdrawn again. He adds that ‘In 1903–04 I had private tutors’.⁶ We know of one such tutor, A. P. May, although Lovecraft did not have a very high opinion of him. There is an unwontedly sarcastic ad for this person in the 3 January 1904 issue of the Rhode Island Journal, proclaiming May as a ‘10th rate Private Tutor’ who is offering ‘Low Grade Instruction at High Rates’; the ad concludes: ‘HIRE ME. I CAN’T DO THE WORK BUT I NEED THE MONEY.’ Perhaps May was teaching Lovecraft things he already knew. In any case, it is not surprising that the flood of scientific periodicals began during the summer of 1903, when he probably had much time to himself.

Lovecraft observes that, when he resumed school attendance in 1902, his attitude was very different from what it had been in 1898: he had learnt in the interim that childhood was customarily regarded as a sort of golden age, and so he resolutely set about ensuring that this would be the case. Actually, he did not need much encouragement; for it was in this year at Slater Avenue that he developed two of his earliest but strongest friendships—with Chester and Harold Munroe, who lived about four blocks away from him. Other friends were Ronald Upham, Stuart Coleman (who had known Lovecraft from his earlier Slater Avenue session), and Kenneth Tanner.

Lovecraft remarked in 1935: ‘Chester Pierce Munroe & I claimed the proud joint distinction of being the worst boys in Slater Ave. School … We were not so actively destructive as merely antinomian in an arrogant & sardonic way—the protest of individuality against capricious, arbitrary, & excessively detailed authority.’⁷ This disregard of rules came to the fore during the graduation ceremony for Lovecraft’s class in June 1903. He was asked to make a speech for the occasion—which may or may not suggest that he was the valedictorian and therefore ranked first in his class—but had initially refused to do so; then, while the ceremony was actually in progress, he changed his mind. Approaching Abbie Hathaway, the school principal, he announced boldly that he wished to make the speech after all, and she acquiesced and duly had him announced. Lovecraft had, however, in the interim written a hasty biography of Sir William Herschel, the astronomer; and as he mounted the podium he declaimed it in ‘my best Georgian mode of speech’. He adds that, though the beginning of the speech ‘elicited smiles, rather than attention’ from the adults in the audience, he nevertheless received a round of applause at the end.⁸

But school was the least significant of Lovecraft’s and his friends’ concerns; they were primarily interested—as boys of that age, however precocious, are—in playing. And play they did. This was the heyday of the Providence Detective Agency, which featured Lovecraft and his pals carrying ‘handcuffs’ (of twine), tape measure, tin badge, and even (for Lovecraft) a real revolver— presumably not loaded. Lovecraft did some actual detective writing at this time: ‘I used to write detective stories very often, the works of A. Conan Doyle being my model so far as plot was concerned’, he writes in 1916, and then goes on to describe one such work about ‘twin brothers—one murders the other, but conceals the body, and tries to live the life of both … This, I think, antedates my 11th year.’⁹ If Lovecraft is accurate in the dating of this tale, it would predate ‘The Mysterious Ship’, and sounds rather more entertaining than that specimen.

Among the enthusiasms which Lovecraft and his boyhood friends shared was railroads. The coachman at 454 Angell Street had built a summer-house for the boy Lovecraft when he was about five. Lovecraft deemed this building ‘The Engine House’ and himself built ‘a splendid engine … by mounting a sort of queer boiler on a tiny express-waggon’. Then, when the coachmen left (probably around 1900) and the stable was vacated of its horses and carriage, the stable itself became his playground, with ‘its immense carriage room, its neat-looking “office”, and its vast upstairs, with the colossal (almost scareful) expanse of the grain loft, and the little three-room apartment where the coachmen and his wife had lived’.¹⁰

Some odd literary works were produced as a result of this interest in railroads. First there is a single issue of a magazine called The Railroad Review (December 1901), a three-page item full of Lovecraft’s usual profusion of illustrations. Much more interesting is a 106-line poem dated to 1901 whose title on the cover reads: An Account in Verse of the Marvellous Adventures of H. Lovecraft, Esq. Whilst Travelling on the W. & B. Branch of the N.Y.N.H. & H.R.R. in Jany. 1901 in One of Those Most Modern of Devices, to Wit: An Electric Train. It bears an alternative title in its interior: ‘H. Lovecraft’s Attempted Journey betwixt Providence & Fall River on the N.Y.N.H. & H.R.R.’

This poem is notable for being the first—and, as it happens, one of the best—instances of Lovecraft’s humorous verse. A little historical background for this piece is useful. The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad (N.Y.N.H. & H.R.R.) had by 1893 become the principal operator of all railroads in the state of Rhode Island. The first electric street cars in Providence had begun running in 1892, and the extension of this service to the outlying localities of Warren, Bristol (the W. & B. Branch), and Fall River appears to have occurred in 1900. With his fascination for railroads, Lovecraft not surprisingly became one of the first patrons of the new service; and the result is a delightfully witty poem on a very modern theme.

In discussing Lovecraft’s boyhood pastimes it is impossible to pass over the Blackstone Military Band. Lovecraft’s violin lessons may have been a disaster, but this was something altogether different. Here’s how he tells it:

When, at the age of 11, I was a member of the Blackstone Military Band, (whose youthful members were all virtuosi on what was called the ‘zobo’—a brass horn with a membrane at one end, which would transform humming to a delightfully brassy impressiveness!) my almost unique ability to keep time was rewarded by my promotion to the post of drummer. That was a difficult thing, insomuch as I was also a star zobo soloist; but the obstacle was surmounted by the discovery of a small papier-mache zobo at the toy store, which I could grip with my teeth without using my hands. Thus my hands were free for drumming—whilst one foot worked a mechanical triangle-beater and the other worked the cymbals—or rather, a wire (adapted from a second triangle-beater) which crashed down on a single horizontal cymbal and made exactly the right cacophony … Had jazz-bands been known at that remote aera, I would certainly have qualified as an ideal general-utility-man— capable of working rattles, cow-bells, and everything that two hands, two feet, and one mouth could handle.¹¹ I don’t think I can add much to this. The zobo appears to have been a sort of combined harmonica and kazoo.

All this may seem to give the impression that Lovecraft, in spite of his precociousness, his early health problems, his solitude as a very young boy, and his unsettled nervous condition, was evolving into an entirely ‘normal’ youth with vigorous teenage interests (except sports and girls, in which he never took any interest). He also seems to have been the leader of his ‘gang’ of boys. But how normal, really, was he? The later testimony of Stuart Coleman is striking: ‘from the age of 8 to 18, I saw quite a bit of him as we went to schools together and I was many times at his home. I won’t say I knew him “well” as I doubt if any of his contemporaries at that time did. He was definitely not a normal child and his companions were few.’¹²

Clara Hess, the same age as Lovecraft, supplies a telling and poignant memory of Lovecraft’s devotion to astronomy around this time:

Howard used to go out into the fields in back of my home to study the stars. One early fall evening several of the children in the vicinity assembled to watch him from a distance. Feeling sorry for his loneliness I went up to him and asked him about his telescope and was permitted to look through it. But his language was so technical that I could not understand it and I returned to my group and left him to his lonely study of the heavens.¹³

This is certainly touching, but one should not conclude that Lovecraft’s ‘loneliness’ was inveterate or even that he necessarily found in it anything to regret: intellectual interests were always dominant in his temperament, and he was entirely willing to sacrifice conventional gregariousness for its sake.

But Lovecraft’s days of innocence came to an abrupt end. Whipple Phillips’ Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company had suffered another serious setback when a drainage ditch was washed out by floods in the spring of 1904; Whipple, now an old man of seventy, cracked under the strain, suffering a stroke and dying on 28 March 1904. This blow was bad enough, but there was still worse to come: because of the mismanagement of Whipple’s estate after his death, relatively little was left of his property and funds; so Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of 454 Angell Street and occupy a smaller house at 598 Angell Street.

This was probably the most traumatic event Lovecraft experienced prior to the death of his mother in 1921. By 1904 he and his mother were living alone with his widowed grandfather, as both of his aunts and his uncle had married. With Whipple gone, it would have been both financially and practically absurd to have maintained the huge house at Angell and Elmgrove just for the two of them, and the residence at 598 Angell Street was no doubt chosen because of its propinquity. It was, however, a duplex (the address is 598–600 Angell Street), and Lovecraft and his mother occupied only the western side of the smallish house. One would imagine that these quarters—which Lovecraft describes as five rooms and an attic¹⁴—would, in literal terms, still be adequate for a boy and his mother; but psychologically the loss of his birthplace, to one so endowed with a sense of place, was shattering. To compound the tragedy, Lovecraft’s beloved cat, Nigger-Man, disappeared sometime in 1904. This was the only pet Lovecraft ever owned in his life, in spite of his almost idolatrous adoration of the felidae. Nigger-Man’s loss perhaps symbolised the loss of his birthplace as no other event could.

To see exactly what an impact the death of his grandfather, the loss of the family fortune (whatever of it was left by this time— Whipple had left an estate valued only at $25,000, of which $5000 went to Susie and $2500 to Lovecraft¹⁵), and the move from his birthplace had on the thirteen-year-old boy, we must read a remarkable letter of 1934:

for the first time I knew what a congested, servantless home—with another family in the same house—was … I felt that I had lost my entire adjustment to the cosmos—for what indeed was HPL without the remembered rooms & hallways & hangings & staircases & statuary & paintings … & yard & walks & cherry-trees & fountain & ivy-grown arch & stable & gardens & all the rest? How could an old man of 14 (& I surely felt that way!) readjust his existence to a skimpy flat & new household programme & inferior outdoor setting in which almost nothing familiar remained? It seemed like a damned futile business to keep on living. No more tutors— high school next September which would probably be a devilish bore, since one couldn’t be as free & easy in high school as one had been during brief snatches at the neighbourly Slater Ave. school … Oh, hell! Why not slough off consciousness altogether?

Was Lovecraft actually contemplating suicide? It certainly seems so—and, incidentally, this seems virtually the only time in Lovecraft’s entire life (idle speculation by later critics notwithstanding) when he seriously thought of self-extinction. What stopped him? Let us read on:

And yet certain elements—notably scientific curiosity & a sense of world drama—held me back. Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answers out of books if I lived & studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments & stratifications get crystallised & upheaved into granite peaks? Geography—just what would Scott & Shackleton & Borchgrevink find in the great white antarctic on their next expeditions … which I could—if I wished—live to see described? And as to history—as I contemplated an exit without further knowledge I became uncomfortably conscious of what I didn’t know. Tantalising gaps existed everywhere. When did people stop speaking Latin & begin to talk Italian & Spanish & French? What on earth ever happened in the black Middle Ages in those parts of the world other than Britain & France (whose story I knew)? What of the vast gulfs of space outside all familiar lands—desert reaches hinted of by Sir John Mandeville & Marco Polo … Tartary, Thibet … What of unknown Africa?¹⁶

This is a defining moment in the life of H. P. Lovecraft. How prototypical that it was not family ties, religious beliefs, or even—so far as the evidence of the above letter indicates—the urge to write that kept him from suicide, but scientific curiosity. Lovecraft may never have finished high school, may never have attained a degree from Brown University, and may have been eternally ashamed of his lack of formal schooling; but he was one of the most prodigious autodidacts in modern history, and he continued not merely to add to his store of knowledge to the end of his life but to revise his world view in light of that knowledge. This, perhaps, is what we ought most to admire about him.

In the short term the dreaded commencement of high school proved—to both Lovecraft’s and his family’s surprise—a delight. Hope Street English and Classical High School, at the corner of Hope and Olney Streets (the building, opened in 1898, was on the southeast corner; the present building, on the southwest corner, was opened in 1938), was a good mile from Lovecraft’s 598 Angell Street home, but there was no closer public high school to which he could have gone. Lovecraft on the whole had a very nice time there:

Knowing of my ungovernable temperament, & of my lawless conduct at Slater Avenue, most of my friends (if friends they may be called) predicted disaster for me, when my will should conflict with the authority of Hope Street’s masculine teachers. But a disappointment of the happier sort occurred. The Hope Street preceptors quickly understood my disposition as ‘Abbie’ [i.e. Abbie Hathaway] never understood it; & by removing all restraint, made me apparently their comrade & equal; so that I ceased to think of discipline, but merely comported myself as a gentleman among gentlemen.¹⁷ Since there are no independent accounts of Lovecraft’s high school years, we have to accept this statement at face value.

Things were not always entirely harmonious between Lovecraft and his teachers, however. He notes several occasions in which he had various academic disputes, the most celebrated of which was with a ‘fat old lady English teacher’ named Mrs Blake. On one occasion she felt that a paper handed in by Lovecraft sounded like something she had read in a newspaper or magazine, and pointedly questioned its originality. Lovecraft boldly admitted that he had copied it directly from a newspaper, and—’as the good soul’s bewilderment became almost apoplectic’¹⁸—pulled out a clipping, ‘Can the Moon Be Reached by Man? By H. P. Lovecraft’—an article he had published in the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner for 12 October 1906. As in several of his Slater Avenue antics, Lovecraft gives the impression of a show-off and smart-alec, and it is perhaps not surprising that his teachers—unsuccessfully, at least as he recounts it—attempted now and again to put him in his place.

It is worth studying what courses Lovecraft actually took during his three years at Hope Street. His transcript survives, and it is full of interesting and suggestive information. The school year lasted for thirty-nine weeks, and most of the courses Lovecraft took covered an entire year; occasionally he took courses lasting only one term, either nineteen or twenty weeks. (In the following enumeration, classes are for thirty-nine weeks save where listed.) Numerical grades were issued; an 80 represented a Certificate grade, 70 a passing grade. During the 1904–05 year, Lovecraft received the following grades: Elementary Algebra (74), Botany (85), English (77), Ancient History (82), and Latin (87). There is not much that is unusual here, except the surprisingly low grade Lovecraft received in English.

Lovecraft returned to Hope High in September 1905, but his transcript states that he left on 7 November of that year, not returning until 10 September 1906 (presumably the beginning of the 1906–07 school year). This is no doubt the period of his ‘nearbreakdown’ of 1906. There is not much evidence as to the nature of this illness. It is surely peculiar that Lovecraft does not admit to a ‘near-breakdown’ in 1904; the 1906 breakdown does not appear to have been as serious as its two predecessors (1898 and 1900), even if it did mean his withdrawal from high school for nearly a year.

When Lovecraft returned for the 1906–07 school year he received high marks in English (90), Plane Geometry (92), and Physics (95), and good marks in several other subjects, including Drawing, Latin, and Greek. The ominous thing here is the continuing low marks for Algebra (75).

In his final year at Hope High (1907–08) Lovecraft took only the following: Intermediate Algebra (ten weeks) (85); Chemistry (95); Physics (95). Here the interesting thing is his retaking Algebra. Lovecraft himself remarks: ‘The first year I barely passed in algebra, but was so little satisfied with what I had accomplished, that I voluntarily repeated the last half of the term.’¹⁹ There is a slight inaccuracy here, since it was not the Elementary Algebra of his first year that he retook but the Intermediate Algebra of the second year; and he does seem to have finally achieved a better grade this time.

The transcript states that Lovecraft left on 10 June 1908, presumably at the end of the term, since he is recorded as having attended the full thirty-nine weeks of chemistry and physics. But he clearly did not receive a diploma, and indeed it is evident that he has only finished the eleventh grade—or perhaps not even that, since he anomalously took only two full courses during this third year. He would surely have required at least another full year of schooling to qualify for graduation.

Lovecraft, aside from finding the teachers more or less congenial, had the usual scrapes with his classmates. He had been called ‘Lovey’ at Slater Avenue, but by the time he became wellestablished at Hope Street he was nicknamed ‘Professor’ because of his published astronomical articles. He admits to having an ‘ungovernable temper’ and being ‘decidedly pugnacious’: ‘Any affront—especially any reflection on my truthfulness or honour as an 18th century gentleman—roused in me a tremendous fury, & I would always start a fight if an immediate retraction were not furnished. Being of scant physical strength, I did not fare well in these encounters; though I would never ask for their termination.’²⁰

The sense of foreboding Lovecraft mentions as preceding his grandfather’s death is evident in his juvenile scientific work—or, rather, in the absence of such work. Both The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy and The Scientific Gazette come to an abrupt end with the issues of 31 January 1904. Lovecraft states that both journals resumed as monthlies, the first in May 1904 and the second in August 1904, but that they were stopped after a few weeks;²¹ these issues do not survive.

And yet, Lovecraft clearly retained his interest in chemistry and, even if he had given up chemical writing, continued conducting experiments in chemistry and obtaining new instruments. Among the latter were a spectroscope (which Lovecraft still owned in 1918) and a spinthariscope for the detection of radioactivity. He relates one ‘physical memorial’ of his chemical interests: ‘the third finger of my right hand—whose palm side is permanently scarred by a mighty phosphorus burn sustained in 1907. At the time, the loss of the finger seemed likely, but the skill of my uncle [F. C. Clark]—a physician—saved it.’²²

As for The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, the later issues (beginning on 16 April 1905) are not appreciably different from their predecessors. Lovecraft is now experimenting with using various colours in the magazine, the only result of which is that some of the issues are extremely difficult to read; by the issue of 14 May 1905 Lovecraft declares that no more colour will be used.

These issues provide some indication of who exactly was reading the magazine. The members of his own family had surely done so at the outset; now that only his mother remained in the house with him, perhaps Lovecraft now concentrated on selling copies (still priced at 1cent per copy, 25 cents for six months, and 50 cents for a year) to his friends and to relatives living in the vicinity. A startling ‘Notice!!’ in the issue of 8 October 1905 states: ‘Subscribers residing outside of Providence will receive their papers in a bunch once a month by mail.’ This notice would not have been necessary unless there were at least a handful of such subscribers. Perhaps one can suspect Lovecraft’s aunt Annie, now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband; and there may have been other relatives.

Still more startling is a notice in the issue of 22 October 1905: ‘Since we have started, others are constantly copying, there is a new paper just out that is a direct copy. PAY NO ATTENTION to these but to the GENUINE.’ Lovecraft’s schoolmates at Hope Street were evidently offering him the sincerest form of flattery, but Lovecraft did not appreciate it.

Lovecraft, then, was making a game effort to resume his normal life and writing after his grandfather’s death and the move to 598 Angell Street. And perhaps his friends lent their assistance. The Providence Detective Agency was revived in 1905 or thereabouts, as well as the Blackstone Orchestra. The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy for 16 April 1905 prints an ad listing H. P. Lovecraft and C. P. Munroe as the leaders (‘Fine music cheap’). The ads continue to appear as late as October 1906. In January 1906 we learn of its ‘New Repertoire—Tenor & Baritone Solos’ as well as ‘Phonograph Concerts’. Can it be that Lovecraft was actually attempting to sing? It certainly seems that way; consider a letter of 1918:

Something over a decade ago I conceived the idea of displacing Sig. Caruso as the world’s greatest lyric vocalist, and accordingly inflicted some weird and wondrous ululations upon a perfectly innocent Edison blank. My mother actually liked the results—mothers are not always unbiased critics— but I saw to it that an accident soon removed the incriminating evidence. Later I tried something less ambitious; a simple, touching, plaintive, ballad sort of thing a la John McCormack. This was a better success, but reminded me so much of the wail of a dying fox-terrier that I very carelessly happened to drop it soon after it was made.²³

Since Lovecraft in a 1933 letter rattles off many of the hit songs of 1906, we can assume that these were the songs he both performed in public and recorded on the phonograph.

This period was also the heyday of the Great Meadow Country Clubhouse. Lovecraft and his pals would ride on bicycles along the Taunton Pike (now State Road 44) to the rural village of Rehoboth, about eight miles from Providence just across the state line into Massachusetts. Here they found a small wooden hut with stone chimney and built an addition to it—’larger than the hut itself’²⁴— where they could conduct whatever games they fancied. The hut and chimney had been built by an old Civil War veteran named James Kay, who probably also assisted them in building the addition. When Lovecraft and Harold Munroe returned to this site in 1921, they found very little changed: ‘Tables stood about as of yore, pictures we knew still adorned the walls with unbroken glass. Not an inch of tar paper was ripped off, & in the cement hearth we found still embedded the small pebbles we stamped in when it was new & wet—pebbles arranged to form the initials G. M. C. C.’²⁵ I saw those pebbles myself about twenty years ago, although on a more recent trip I found them almost entirely scattered. Now, of course, only the stone chimney remains, and even that is disintegrating. In its day it must have been an impressive sight.

Also at this time Lovecraft himself developed an interest in firearms. Recall that during the initial creation of the Providence Detective Agency he himself, unlike the other boys, sported a real revolver. Lovecraft evidently amassed a fairly impressive collection of rifles, revolvers, and other firearms: ‘After 1904 I had a long succession of 22-calibre rifles, & became a fair shot till my eyes played hell with my accuracy.’²⁶ At this point Lovecraft seemed to lose interest, and he sold off most of his weapons.

Interestingly, Lovecraft began to guide Chester and Harold Munroe into more academic interests, enlisting them as assistants and even colleagues in some of his own intellectual work. The Rhode Island Journal for March 1906 states that a meteorological sub-station has been opened by Harold at his home at 66 Patterson Street. Three months later we hear of the establishment of a Providence Astronomical Society. At this time one of the Munroes assisted Lovecraft in giving a lecture on the sun at the East Side Historical Club by showing lantern slides. I do not imagine that this was anything but a group of Lovecraft’s high school friends; we shall see later that they continued to meet in this fashion for several years.

Rather different was the lecture Lovecraft gave to the Boys’ Club of the First Baptist Church on 25 January 1907.²⁷ This was clearly a formal organization, although I do not believe that Lovecraft was a member: if the contretemps with his Sunday school class (for which see below) dates to 1902, it is not likely that he would have been invited back any time soon. But the mere fact that he gave the lecture may indicate that he had achieved a certain celebrity as an astronomical authority; for he had already become widely published in the local papers by this time.

The death of Lovecraft’s grandfather roughly coincided with the emergence of two new elderly male figures in his personal and intellectual life: his uncles, Dr Franklin Chase Clark (1847–1915) and Edward Francis Gamwell (1869–1936).

Lovecraft became acquainted with Gamwell in 1895, when the latter began courting his aunt Annie Emeline Phillips. Edward and Annie married on 3 January 1897, with the six-year-old Lovecraft serving as usher. Annie went to live with Edward in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Edward was the city editor of the Cambridge Chronicle (1896–1901), then the Cambridge Tribune (1901–12), and then the Boston Budget and Beacon (1913–15). But Annie and Edward visited Providence frequently, especially after the birth on 23 April 1898 of Phillips Gamwell, Lovecraft’s only first cousin on the maternal side. Gamwell taught Lovecraft to recite the Greek alphabet at the age of six, and Lovecraft even maintains that it was his uncle’s extensive editorial capacities that incited him to start The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy.²⁸

Lovecraft was much closer to Dr Clark than to Gamwell, and indeed the former became after Whipple’s death exactly the sort of father replacement Whipple himself had been. Franklin Chase Clark had received an A.B. from Brown University in 1869, as Edward F. Gamwell would in 1894, had attended Harvard Medical School in 1869–70 (where he is likely to have studied with Oliver Wendell Holmes), and had gone on to attain his M.D. at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He married Lillian Delora Phillips on 10 April 1902. Lovecraft does not mention being involved with the wedding, but he probably served in some capacity. One imagines that Lillian left 454 Angell Street at that time and moved in with her husband, who lived at 80 Olney Street.

In spite of Clark’s scientific background, it was in the area of belles-lettres that he exerted the greatest influence on the young Lovecraft. Clark had translated Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, and Statius into English verse, and Lovecraft reports that he ‘did much to correct & purify my faulty style’,²⁹ specifically in verse but also in prose. We can perhaps see Clark’s influence as early as the accomplished classical verses in Poemata Minora, Volume II (1902).

One hopes, however, that Clark did not have any influence on the only surviving poem by Lovecraft between Poemata Minora and the several poems written in 1912: ‘De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Nature over Northern Ignorance’ (July 1905). This poem, dedicated to William Benjamin Smith, author of The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1905), is the first explicitly racist document Lovecraft ever produced; but it was not to be the last. In twenty-four lines Lovecraft paraphrases several central arguments out of Smith’s book: that the Civil War was a tragic mistake; that freeing blacks and granting them civil and political rights is folly; and that in so doing the abolitionists have actually ensured the extinction of the black race in America. How will that occur? The argument expressed in the poem is a little cryptic, and cannot be understood without recourse to Smith’s book. Smith maintains that the inherent biological inferiority of blacks, their physiological and psychological weaknesses, will cause them to perish over time. This allows Smith to conclude that the blacks will simply wither and die. All that can be said in defence of ‘De Triumpho Naturae’ is that it is a little less virulent than Smith.

The whole issue of Lovecraft’s racism is one I shall have to treat throughout this book. It is not likely that at the age of fifteen Lovecraft had formulated clear views on the matter of race, and his attitudes were surely influenced by his environment and upbringing. Recall Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s hallucinations regarding a ‘negro’ who was molesting his wife; it is conceivable that he could have passed on his prejudice against blacks even to his two-yearold son. Lovecraft’s most virulently prejudiced letters were written in the 1920s to his aunt Lillian, who in all likelihood shared his sentiments, as probably did most of the other members of his family.

Lovecraft himself supplies a highly illuminating account of his early views on the subject when he notes his reaction to entering Hope Street High School in 1904:

But Hope Street is near enough to the ‘North End’ to have a considerable Jewish attendance. It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly and schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid and their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semite before I had been at Hope Street many days.³⁰

Lovecraft appears to make that last utterance with some pride. This whole passage is considerably embarrassing to those who wish to exculpate Lovecraft on the ground that he never took any direct actions against the racial or ethnic groups he despised but merely confined his remarks to paper.

‘De Triumpho Naturae’ appears to be an isolated example of this ugly strain in Lovecraft’s early thought and writing; in other regards he continued to pursue abstract intellectual endeavour. A more significant literary product of 1905—one for which Franklin Chase Clark probably provided impetus and guidance—was A Manual of Roman Antiquities. This work very likely gave Lovecraft much-needed practice in sustained prose composition; certainly his prose needed work, if ‘The Mysterious Ship’ was the best he could do in 1902. Something remarkable certainly seems to have happened in the three years subsequent to the writing of ‘The Mysterious Ship’, and it is highly unfortunate that we have no tales from this period. We accordingly find ourselves wholly unprepared for the surprising competence and maturity of the tale entitled ‘The Beast in the Cave’.

The first draft of this tale was written prior to the move from 454 Angell Street in the spring of 1904, and the finished version dates to 21 April 1905. Lovecraft reports having spent ‘days of boning at the library’³¹ (i.e., the Providence Public Library) in researching the locale of the tale, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. It would take Lovecraft quite some time to learn the wisdom of basing a tale’s locale on first-hand, rather than second-hand, information.

‘The Beast in the Cave’ deals with a man who, lost in Mammoth Cave, comes upon a creature whom he initially takes to be an ape but who proves to be a man who has been lost in the cave for years. The tale is admirably well told and suspenseful, although not many will have failed to guess the conclusion. In spite of Lovecraft’s later dismissal of it as ‘ineffably pompous and Johnsonese’,³² ‘The Beast in the Cave’ is a remarkable story for a fourteen-year-old, and represents a quantum leap over the crudeness of ‘The Mysterious Ship’. Lovecraft is right to declare that in it ‘I first wrote a story worth reading’.³³

‘The Alchemist’ (1908) is still more of an advance in style and technique. This tale recounts an ancient aristocratic family in France that appears to be afflicted with a curse whereby the eldest son in each generation dies before the age of thirty-two; but the true cause of the curse is the machinations of Charles Le Sorcier, a magician who has extended his life preternaturally in order to kill each eldest son.

This tale, much more than its predecessor, betrays the influence of Poe in the narrator’s obsessive interest in his own psychological state; indeed, many details in the story make us think of Lovecraft’s remark that he himself ‘felt a kinship to Poe’s gloomy heroes with their broken fortunes’.³⁴ Antoine, the narrator, is of a lofty and ancient line; but ‘poverty but little above the level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour’. As a result, Antoine—an only child—spends his years alone, ‘poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood’; he is kept away from the ‘peasant children’ who dwell nearby. All this can be seen as a deliberately distorted, but still recognizable, reflection of Lovecraft’s own childhood and upbringing. The last page of the autograph manuscript of ‘The Beast in the Cave’ bears the following notation:

Tales of Terror

I. The Beast in the Cave

By H. P. Lovecraft

(Period–Modern)

It is interesting to note that Lovecraft was already at this time thinking of assembling a collection of his tales; we do not know what other tales, if any, were to make up the volume. The autograph manuscript of ‘The Alchemist’ does not survive, so we do not know whether it formed part of this volume; probably it did.

We have only hints of what further tales Lovecraft wrote in the next three years, for he declares that in 1908 he destroyed all but two of the stories he had been writing over the last five years.³⁵ Late in life Lovecraft discovered a composition book bearing the title of one lost story dating to 1905: ‘Gone—But Whither?’ He remarks wryly: ‘I’ll bet it was a hell-raiser! The title expresses the fate of the tale itself.’³⁶ Then there was something called ‘The Picture’ (1907), which in his Commonplace Book he describes as concerning a ‘painting of ultimate horror’. Elsewhere he says of it:

I had a man in a Paris garret paint a mysterious canvas embodying the quintessential essence of all horror. He is found clawed & mangled one morning before his easel. The picture is destroyed, as in a titanic struggle—but in one corner of the frame a bit of canvas remains … & on it the coroner finds to his horror the painted counterpart of the sort of claw which evidently killed the artist.³⁷

There was also a story about a Roman settlement in America, although Lovecraft states that he never completed it.³⁸

By 1908, the time of the fourth ‘near-breakdown’ of his young life, Lovecraft had decided that he was not a fiction-writer, and resolved instead to devote himself to science and belles-lettres. At that time, in spite of the promise shown by ‘The Beast in the Cave’ and ‘The Alchemist’, his decision would not have been entirely unwarranted. Lovecraft had by this time already amassed an impressive record of publications on science, and it would have been reasonable for him to have assumed that he would continue to pursue such a course and become a professional writer in this field.

Lovecraft first broke into true print with a letter (dated 27 May 1906) printed in the Providence Sunday Journal for 3 June; it concerns a point of astronomy. On 16 July 1906 Lovecraft wrote a letter to the Scientific American on the subject of finding planets in the solar system beyond Neptune. Much to his delight, it was published in the issue of 25 August 1906. Around this time, Lovecraft simultaneously began to write two astronomy columns for local papers, the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner and the Providence Tribune (morning, evening, and Sunday editions). The Gleaner articles begin on 27 July 1906, and after a hiatus of a month progress weekly until the end of the year. The Tribune articles commence on 1 August 1906 and proceed monthly until 1 June 1908.

The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner was a weekly based in Phenix, Rhode Island, a community now incorporated into the city of West Warwick, well to the west and south of Providence. Lovecraft describes it as a ‘country paper’ and states that it was ‘more than willing to print & feature anything from Whipple V. Phillips’ grandson’.³⁹ In this letter he maintains that ‘During 1906, 1907, & 1908 I flooded the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner with my prose articles’; but no issues subsequent to 28 December 1906 seem to survive. Evidence exists, however, that the paper did indeed continue at least through 1907, so it appears that we have lost a good many articles that Lovecraft published in it.

The Gleaner articles—many of them based upon corresponding articles or serials in the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy—do more than merely provide information on the astronomical phenomena for the month; they are among the first of several attempts by Lovecraft over the years to educate the public on the fundamentals of astronomy. In the present instance, Lovecraft has chosen provocative queries about Mars, the moon, and the solar system which he believes (probably rightly) the public will find stimulating.

The articles for the Providence Tribune tend to be less interesting only because they rather mechanically deal with the purportedly noteworthy celestial phenomena of each month, becoming somewhat repetitive in the process. They are distinguished, however, for the fact that they are among the few occasions when illustrations by Lovecraft were published: of the twenty articles, sixteen were accompanied by hand-drawn star charts.

My feeling is that a purchase Lovecraft made at this time with his own money—a rebuilt 1906 Remington typewriter—was connected with these published astronomy articles. The typewriter was not used for preparing his hectographed scientific journals (for they remain handwritten to the very end) nor even, apparently, the fiction he was writing (no typescripts from this period survive), so that the preparation of the astronomy columns—the only things he was submitting to a publisher at this time—would be the only logical purpose for securing a typewriter. It was the only typewriter Lovecraft would ever own in his life.

Lovecraft also states that he wrote a lengthy treatise, A Brief Course in Astronomy—Descriptive, Practical, and Observational; for Beginners and General Readers, in 1906: ‘it got as far as the typed and hand-illustrated stage (circa one hundred fifty pages), though no copy survives’.⁴⁰ It is clearly the most substantial scientific work he had ever written or ever would write.

The quotation from ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ with which I opened this chapter suggests how radically the study of astronomy affected Lovecraft’s entire philosophical conception of the universe. Indeed, it is around the period of 1906 that we can definitively date Lovecraft’s philosophical awakening. Previous to that there had been only his various conflicts with church authorities in Sunday school. His first attendance, if it truly dates to the age of seven, saw him taking sides with the Romans against the Christians, but only because of his fondness for Roman history and culture and not out of any specifically anticlerical bias. By the age of nine, as he declares, he was conducting a sort of experimental course in comparative religion, pretending to believe in various faiths to see whether they convinced him; evidently none did. This led to his final Sunday school encounter:

How well I recall my tilts with Sunday-School teachers during my last period of compulsory attendance! I was 12 years of age, and the despair of the institution. None of the answers of my pious preceptors would satisfy me, and my demands that they cease taking things for granted quite upset them. Close reasoning was something new in their little world of Semitic mythology. At last I saw that they were hopelessly bound to unfounded dogmata and traditions, and thenceforward ceased to treat them seriously. SundaySchool became to me simply a place wherein to have a little harmless fun spoofing the pious mossbacks. My mother observed this, and no longer sought to enforce my attendance.⁴¹ These sessions presumably occurred at the First Baptist Church, where his mother was still on the rolls.

But years of astronomical study triggered the ‘cosmicism’ that would form so central a pillar of both his philosophical and his aesthetic thought:

By my thirteenth birthday I was thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance, and by my seventeenth, about which time I did some particularly detailed writing on the subject, I had formed in all essential particulars my present pessimistic cosmic views. The futility of all existence began to impress and oppress me; and my references to human progress, formerly hopeful, began to decline in enthusiasm. (‘A Confession of Unfaith’)

Having sloughed off any belief in deity as scientifically unjustified, Lovecraft was left with the awareness that humankind was (probably) alone in the universe—at least, we have no way to establish contact with extraterrestrial races—and that the quantitative insignificance of the planet and all its inhabitants, both spatially and temporally, carried with it the corollary of a qualitative insignificance.

A rather remarkable consequence of Lovecraft’s philosophical interests was a reformist instinct that led him to attempt to educate the masses—or, at least, one member of them. Lovecraft came upon a Swedish boy, Arthur Fredlund, at the Providence Public Library, and brought him frequently to his home to foster his education. The degree to which Lovecraft took Fredlund under his wing is suggested by the fact that Fredlund (no doubt with Lovecraft’s aid) revived and become the editor of The Scientific Gazette, which had been defunct since September 1905. That Lovecraft would have allowed Fredlund to take over the earliest of his scientific periodicals must have meant that he saw great things in the boy. Eventually, however, Lovecraft uncovered unspecified ‘qualities’ in Fredlund that he did not like, so he abandoned him to his ‘plebeian fate’.⁴²

In 1908 Lovecraft stood at the threshold of adulthood: he was doing reasonably well at Hope Street High School, he had become prodigiously learned in chemistry, geography, astronomy, and meteorology, and he was accomplished in belles-lettres as a Latinist, poet, and fiction writer. He seemed destined for a career as an academician of some sort; perhaps he would be a sort of transatlantic version of those later Oxford dons who wrote detective stories, teaching astronomy at a university while writing horror tales in his spare time. In any event, the future for so precocious and accomplished a young man seemed assured.

What derailed that future—and what ensured that Lovecraft would never lead a ‘normal’ life—was his fourth ‘nearbreakdown’, clearly the most serious of his life. In some ways he never recovered from it.

CHAPTER FIVE

Barbarian and Alien (1908–14)

Lovecraft is very reticent about the causes or sources of what we can only regard as a full-fledged nervous breakdown in the summer of 1908. Beyond the mere fact of its occurrence, we know little. Consider four statements, made from 1915 to 1935:

In 1908 I should have entered Brown University, but the broken state of my health rendered the idea absurd. I was and am a prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness which prevents my continuous application to any thing.¹

In 1908 I was about to enter Brown University, when my health completely gave way—causing the necessary abandonment of my college career.²

after all, high-school was a mistake. I liked it, but the strain was too keen for my health, and I suffered a nervous collapse in 1908 immediately after graduating, which prevented altogether my attending college.³

My health did not permit me to go to the university— indeed, the steady application to high-school gave me a sort of breakdown.⁴

In the first, second, and fourth of these statements Lovecraft is a little disingenuous: he implies that his entry into Brown University was a matter of course, but in fact he never graduated from high school, and certainly would have required at least another year of schooling before he could have done so. The third statement, which states that he actually did graduate, is one of the few instances I have found where Lovecraft plainly lies about himself.

Since we are generally left in the dark about the nature of this breakdown, we can work only on conjecture. We have two pieces of external evidence. One comes from Harry Brobst, who spoke to a woman who had gone to high school with Lovecraft:

She … described these terrible tics that he had—he’d be sitting in his seat and he’d suddenly up and jump—I think they referred to them as seizures. The family took him out of high school, and then whatever education he got presumably was done by private tutors, whatever that meant.⁵

This certainly is a remarkable account, and suggests that Lovecraft’s chorea minor (if that is what it was) had not entirely worn off even by this time. Brobst, a Ph.D. in psychology who was trained as a psychiatric nurse, considers the possibility of ‘chorea-like symptoms’ and also conjectures that a hysteroid seizure—a purely psychological ailment without any organic basis—may have been involved. Whether these seizures were the actual cause of his removal from high school is something that cannot now be settled.

The other piece of evidence comes from Harold W. Munro, who writes that Lovecraft had been climbing on a house under construction and had fallen, landing on his head.⁶ Munro does not date this incident (which he himself did not see but only heard about), but he implicitly links it with Lovecraft’s withdrawal from high school.

The breakdown—whether purely mental or nervous or a combination of mental and physical factors—was, clearly, something related to his schoolwork, the same sort of thing that may have caused his milder breakdown of 1906; although even ‘steady application’ in only three classes (all he was taking in his third year at Hope Street) would not seem sufficient to induce so severe a collapse. Note, however, what three courses he was taking: chemistry, physics, and algebra. He was receiving the highest marks in the first two; in algebra he was repeating a part of the course he had taken the previous year. My feeling, therefore, is that Lovecraft’s relative failure to master algebra made him gradually awaken to the realization that he could never do serious professional work in either chemistry or astronomy, and that therefore a career in these two fields was an impossibility. This would have been a shattering conception, requiring a complete revaluation of his career goals. Consider this remark, made in 1931:

In studies I was not bad—except for mathematics, which repelled and exhausted me. I passed in these subjects—but just about that. Or rather, it was algebra which formed the bugbear. Geometry was not so bad. But the whole thing disappointed me bitterly, for I was then intending to pursue astronomy as a career, and of course advanced astronomy is simply a mass of mathematics. That was the first major setback I ever received—the first time I was ever brought up short against a consciousness of my own limitations. It was clear to me that I hadn’t brains enough to be an astronomer— and that was a pill I couldn’t swallow with equanimity.⁷

Again, Lovecraft does not connect this with his breakdown of 1908, but I think the implication of a connection is strong. I repeat that this is a conjecture, but, until further evidence is forthcoming, it may be the best we have.

One more small piece of evidence comes from Lovecraft’s wife, who reports that Lovecraft told her that his sexual instincts were at their greatest at the age of nineteen.⁸ It is conceivable that sex frustration—for I do not imagine Lovecraft acted upon his urges at this time—may have been a contributory cause of his breakdown; but, for one whose sexuality was, in general, so sluggish as Lovecraft’s, I am not convinced that this was a significant factor.

As a result of this breakdown, Lovecraft virtually withdrew from the world, so that the period 1908–13 is a virtual blank in his life. It is the only time in his life when we do not have a significant amount of information on what he was doing from day to day, who his friends and associates were, and what he was writing. It is also the only time of his life when the term ‘eccentric recluse’—which many have used with careless ignorance—can rightly be applied to him.

Lovecraft doggedly attempted to maintain his scientific interests, although it seems a little pathetic that he revived his juvenile periodicals, The Scientific Gazette and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, in early 1909, the latter after two years’, the former after four years’ hiatus (not counting the apparently brief revival by Arthur Fredlund). The sole issue of the Gazette for this period (January 1909) has an interesting ad for the ‘International Correspondence Schoolsespoh܀ in Scranton, Pennsylvania, offering a complete course for $161.00. This is no doubt the correspondence course in chemistry that Lovecraft admits to taking ‘for a time’.⁹ As to where he learned of this organisation, I shall have more to say a little later. That Lovecraft’s mother was willing to pay out the money for such a thing suggests that she was still allowing him freedom to pursue his interests; perhaps she thought this course might lead to a job, although that likelihood was surely remote. Once again, however, it was the more technical or tedious parts of the science that caused him difficulty: ‘I found myself so wretched bored that I positively could not study for more than fifteen minutes without acquiring an excruciating headache which prostrated me completely for the rest of the day.’¹⁰ One significant work did come out of this, however: A Brief Course in Inorganic Chemistry, written in 1910 and deemed by Lovecraft a ‘bulky manuscript’.¹¹ This work, so far as I know, does not survive, and we know nothing of its contents.

Lovecraft did attempt a more ambitious astronomical project, but it was not designed for publication. This is an astronomical notebook, once in the possession of David H. Keller and later in the Grill-Binkin collection of Lovecraftiana. It bears the title ‘Astronomical Observations Made by H. P. Lovecraft, 598 Angell St., Providence, R.I., U.S.A., Years 1909 / 1910 / 1911 / 1912 / 1913 / 1914 / 1915’. Keller¹² reports that the book contains at least one hundred pages of writing; page 99 has the following: Principal Astronomical Work

1. To keep track of all celestial phenomena month by month, as positions of planets, phases of the moon, Sign of Sun, occultations, Meteor Showers, unusual phenomena (record) also new discoveries.

2. To keep up a working knowledge of the constellations and their seasons.

3. To observe all planets, etc. with a large telescope when they are favourably situated (at 7 h 30” in winter, abt. 9 h in summer, supplemented by morning observations)

4. To observe opera or field glass objects among the stars with a low power instruments, recording results.

5. To keep a careful record of each night’s work.

6. To contribute a monthly astronomical article of about 7p. Ms. or 4p. Type to the Providence Evening News¹³ (begun Jan. 1, 1914.)

This sounds like an impressive agenda, but Lovecraft did not maintain it consistently; in fact, Keller reports that for the years 1911 and 1913 there are no observations at all. Otherwise what we have are things like an eclipse of the moon on 3 June 1909, a ‘lengthy description’ of Halley’s Comet on 26 May 1910, a partial eclipse of the moon on 11–12 March 1914, and a long discussion of Delavan’s Comet on 16–17 September 1914. I have not been able to consult this document myself and am reliant on Keller’s account of it; but it does not seem to offer much evidence that Lovecraft was doing anything either to relieve his reclusiveness or to find a useful position in the outside world.

Later in life Lovecraft knew that, in spite of his lack of university education, he should have received training in some sort of clerical or other white-collar position that would at least have allowed him to secure employment rather than moping about at home:

I made the mistake in youth of not realising that literary endeavour does not always mean an income. I ought to have trained myself for some routine clerical work (like Charles Lamb’s or Hawthorne’s) affording a dependable stipend yet leaving my mind free enough for a certain amount of creative activity—but in the absence of immediate need I was too damned a fool to look ahead. I seemed to think that sufficient money for ordinary needs was something which everyone had as a matter of course—and if I ran short, I ‘could always sell a story or poem or something’. Well—my calculations were inaccurate!¹⁴ And so Lovecraft condemned himself to a life of ever-increasing poverty.

What was his mother doing in this entire situation? It is a little hard to say. Recall her own medical record at Butler Hospital (now destroyed) as quoted by Winfield Townley Scott: ‘a woman of narrow interests who received, with a traumatic psychosis, an awareness of approaching bankruptcy’.¹⁵ This assessment was made in 1919, but the condition must have been developing for years, at the very least since the death of Susie’s own father, Whipple Phillips. Although she had high praise for her son (‘a poet of the highest order’), Scott rightly conjectures: ‘However she adored him, there may have been a subconscious criticism of Howard, so brilliant but so economically useless.’ No doubt her disappointment with her son’s inability to finish high school, go to college, and support himself did not help this situation any.

Lovecraft, in speaking of the steady economic decline of the family, notes ‘several sharp jogs downward, as when an uncle lost a lot of dough for my mother and me in 1911’.¹⁶ Faig is almost certainly correct in identifying this uncle as Susie’s brother Edwin E. Phillips.¹⁷ Edwin had difficulty even maintaining his own economic position, as his chequered employment record indicates. We do not, of course, know how Edwin lost money for Susie and Howard, but one suspects that it had something to do with bad investments, which not only failed to yield interest but also dissolved the capital.

The effect of all this on Susie, and on her view of her son, can only be conjectured. Consider the following disturbing anecdote related by Clara Hess, which I believe dates to around this time if not a little earlier:

when she [Susie] moved into the little downstairs flat in the house on Angell Street around the corner from Butler Avenue I met her often on the Butler Avenue cars, and one day after many urgent invitations I went in to call upon her. She was considered then to be getting rather odd. My call was pleasant enough but the house had a strange and shutup air and the atmosphere seemed weird and Mrs. Lovecraft talked continuously of her unfortunate son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze at him.

When I protested that she was exaggerating and that he should not feel that way, she looked at me with a rather pitiful look as though I did not understand about it. I remember that I was glad to get out in the fresh air and sunshine and that I did not repeat my visit.¹⁸

This is one of the most notorious pieces of evidence regarding Lovecraft and his mother, and I see no reason why we should not accept it. The reference to ‘hideous’ is presumably to his physical appearance, and this is why I want to date the anecdote to Lovecraft’s late teens or early twenties: as a younger boy he is so normal-looking that no one—even a mother who was getting a little ‘odd’—could have deemed him hideous; but by the age of eighteen or twenty he had perhaps reached his full height of five feet eleven inches, and had probably developed that long, prognathous jaw which he himself in later years considered a physical defect. Harold W. Munro notes that as early as his high school years Lovecraft was bothered by ingrown facial hairs; but when Munro speaks of ‘mean red cuts’ on Lovecraft’s face he evidently believes these to have been the product of a dull razor. In fact, as Lovecraft attests, these cuts came from his using a needle and tweezers to pull out the ingrown hairs.¹⁹ This recurring ailment—which did not subside until Lovecraft was well into his thirties—may also have negatively affected his perception of his appearance. As late as February 1921, only a few months before his mother’s death, Lovecraft writes to his mother of a new suit that ‘made me appear as nearly respectable as my face permits’.²⁰

I am of course not trying to defend this remark by Lovecraft’s mother—surely no mother ought ever to say such a thing about her son, no matter how ugly he in fact is—and it may also be that her comment has a somewhat broader implication. It has often been conjectured that she was transferring to her son the hatred and disgust she felt for her husband after he was stricken with syphilis, and I think this is very likely. Susie, of course, is not likely to have known the exact nature or causes of her husband’s ailment—the doctors themselves did not do so—but she may have sensed that something relating to sex had afflicted him; and, now that her own son was developing into an adult male with burgeoning sexual instincts, she may have feared that he might turn out very much like her husband—especially if Lovecraft had at this time taken to wearing his father’s clothing. In any case, I do not think we have any grounds to deny that she made the ‘hideous’ remark; Lovecraft himself once (and only once) admitted to his wife that his mother’s attitude to him was (and this is his word) ‘devastating’,²¹ and we need look no further for the reasons for that than this single comment.

Both Clara Hess and Harold W. Munro give evidence that Lovecraft did indeed avoid human contact in his post-high-school period. Hess writes: ‘Sometimes I would see Howard when walking up Angell Street, but he would not speak and would stare ahead with his coat collar turned up and chin down.’²² Munro states: ‘Very much an introvert, he darted about like a sleuth, hunched over, always with books or papers clutched under his arm, peering straight ahead recognizing nobody.’²³

We have the merest scraps of information as to what Lovecraft was actually doing during this entire period. One highly suggestive datum is his admission that he visited Moosup Valley, and specifically the Stephen Place house in Foster (birthplace of his mother and grandmother), in 1908. This visit can scarcely have been purely recreational. His mother accompanied him, as there is a photograph of her (probably taken by Lovecraft himself) standing in front of the house.²⁴ Once again it seems as if Lovecraft required some sort of renewal of ancestral ties to help him out of a difficult psychological trauma; but in this case the visit seems to have accomplished little.

The record for 1909 (aside from his astronomical observations and the correspondence courses) is entirely blank. For 1910 we know that he saw Halley’s Comet, but probably not at Ladd Observatory. In 1918 he stated:

I no more visit the Ladd Observatory or various other attractions of Brown University. Once I expected to utilise them as a regularly entered student, and some day perhaps control some of them as a faculty member. But having known them with this ‘inside’ attitude, I am today unwilling to visit them as a casual outsider and non-university barbarian and alien.²⁵

This sense of alienation presumably began soon after his collapse in 1908, and he probably saw Halley’s with his own telescope. He mentions that he missed seeing a bright comet earlier that year ‘by being flat in bed with a hellish case of measles!’²⁶ Elsewhere he states that he lost 54 pounds during this bout with the measles and nearly died.²⁷ The year 1910 was, however, the period of his most frequent attendance of stage plays, and he reports seeing many Shakespeare productions at the Providence Opera House that year. He also visited Cambridge, Massachusetts—probably to see his aunt Annie Gamwell and his twelve-year-old cousin Phillips. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday—20 August 1911—by riding the electric trolley cars all day, going through the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts before coming home.

Did Lovecraft continue to associate with his boyhood friends? The evidence is a little ambiguous. No doubt he felt a certain sense of failure and defeat as he saw his high school friends marry, find jobs, and in general take on the responsibilities of adult life. But consider this remarkable testimony from Addison P. Munroe, whom Winfield Townley Scott interviewed:

He lived but a few houses distant from our own home and was quite frequently over here with our sons. I remember that we had a room fixed up in our basement for the boys to use as a club room, which was a popular place with Howard. The club, so called, consisted of about a half-dozen of the neighborhood boys, around twenty years of age, and when they had a so-called ‘banquet,’ improvised and usually selfcooked, Howard was always the speaker of the evening and my boys always said he delivered addresses that were gems.²⁸

This appears to be East Side Historical Club, still meeting even after the boys had graduated from high school. If Munroe is right about the boys’ age, then these sessions would have occurred exactly at the time (1910) when Lovecraft was maintaining that he ‘shunned all human society’,²⁹ in particular his friends. Lovecraft, in fact, never lost touch with the Munroes, as a number of subsequent events will demonstrate; and Addison P. Munroe may well be right about both the nature and the date of these meetings. Lovecraft gives a picture of his literary production during this ‘empty’ period:

Chemical writing—plus a little historical and antiquarian research—filled my years of feebleness till about 1911, when I had a reaction toward literature. I then gave my prose style the greatest overhauling it has ever had; purging it at once of some vile journalese and some absurd Johnsonianism. Little by little I felt that I was forging the instrument I ought to have forged a decade ago—a decent style capable of expressing what I wished tosay. But I still wrote verse and persisted in the delusion that I was a poet.³⁰

The curious thing about this is that we have very few examples of his expository prose between ‘The Alchemist’ (1908) and the beginning of his astronomy column for the Providence Evening News on 1 January 1914. What we do have are a series of poems presumably written ‘about 1911’ or sometime thereafter. Few of these are at all distinguished, but one is of consuming biographical interest: ‘The Members of the Men’s Club of the First Universalist Church of Providence, R.I., to Its President, About to Leave for Florida on Account of His Health’.

There is no clear way of dating this poem, and it may have been written as early as 1910 or as late as 1914; but what is remarkable about it is its mere existence, indicating that Lovecraft was a member of this men’s club. The First Universalist Society, established in Providence since 1821, had a new church built in 1872 at the corner of Greene and Washington Streets, near the Providence Public Library; and this must have been where Lovecraft went when he participated in the men’s club. I can only sense the hand of Lovecraft’s mother in this entire enterprise: having failed on at least two occasions to inculcate standard Sunday school training in him as a boy, she perhaps felt that a less rigidly doctrinal church would be more to his liking. Actually, in all likelihood it was a means of preventing Lovecraft from becoming wholly withdrawn from society—in effect, of getting him out of the house every now and then.

The other poems written around this time similarly concern themselves with local affairs, and unfortunately their one clear thematic link is racism. ‘Providence in 2000 A.D.’ is Lovecraft’s first published poem, appearing in the Evening Bulletin for 4 March 1912. It is actually quite funny, although much of the humour would not be very well received today. The parenthetical prose paragraph that prefaces the poem—’(It is announced in the Providence Journal that the Italians desire to alter the name of Atwell’s Avenue to “Columbus Avenue”)’—tells the whole story: Lovecraft ridicules the idea that the Italians of the Federal Hill area have any right to change the Yankee-bestowed name of the principal thoroughfare of their own district. (The street was never renamed.) The satire tells of an Englishman who, in the year 2000, returns to Rhode Island, the land of his forebears, and finds everything foreignized. The fact that the Evening Bulletin published this poem must mean that others aside from Lovecraft found it funny.

Other poems of this period are much nastier, but were not published at the time. ‘New-England Fallen’ (April 1912) is a wretched 152-line spasm speaking of some mythical time when hard-working, pious Anglo-Saxon yeomen established the dominant culture of New England only to have ‘foreign boors’ infiltrate the society and corrupt it from within:

The village rings with ribald foreign cries;

Around the wine-shops loaf with bleary eyes A vicious crew, that mock the name of ‘man’, Yet dare to call themselves ‘American’.

This is surely close to the nadir of Lovecraft’s poetic output—not only for the ignorant racism involved, but for its array of trite, hackneyed imagery and nauseating sentimentality in depicting the blissful life of the stolid yeoman farmer. Perhaps only the notorious ‘On the Creation of Niggers’ (1912) exceeds this specimen in vileness. Here is the entire poem:

When, long ago, the Gods created Earth,

In Jove’s fair image Man was shap’d at birth. The beasts for lesser parts were next design’d; Yet were they too remote from humankind.

To fill this gap, and join the rest to man,

Th’ Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.

A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure, Fill’d it with vice, and call’d the thing a NIGGER.

No publication has been found for this poem. The text survives, however, in a hectographed copy, which suggests that Lovecraft may at least have passed this poem around to friends or family; it is likely that they approved—or at least did not object—to his sentiments.

A somewhat more innocuous poem is ‘Quinsnicket Park’, which Lovecraft dates to 1913. Quinsnicket Park (now called Lincoln Woods Park) is situated four miles north of Providence, and was one of Lovecraft’s favourite sylvan retreats; throughout his life he would walk there and read or write in the open air. His 117-line paean to this rustic haven is trite, wooden, and mechanical.

We do not know much else about Lovecraft’s specific activities during these years. It is likely that he sequestered himself in his study and read enormous quanitites of books, whether it be science or belles lettres; it was probably at this time that he laid the foundations for that later erudition in so many fields which astounded his colleagues. No doubt he continued to read weird fiction also.

One specific type of fiction we know Lovecraft read in great quantities was the work contained in the early Munsey magazines. It is a point of debate whether the various magazines founded by Frank A. Munsey are or are not to be considered pulp magazines; for our purposes it will suffice to say that they were significant forerunners of the pulp magazines and form a natural chain of continuity in popular magazine fiction from the dime and nickel novels of the later nineteenth century to the genuine pulps of the 1920s. As avid a dime novel reader as Lovecraft appears to have been, it is in no way surprising that he would ultimately find the Munsey magazines a compelling if guilty pleasure. What he did not know at the time was that they would radically transform his life and his career—largely, but not uniformly, for the better.

Lovecraft mentions an article in a Munsey magazine in one of his hectographed magazines in 1903. Whether he read them continuously from this point on his unclear; but there is no gainsaying his remark in the following letter to the All-Story Weekly for 7 March 1914:

Having read every number of your magazine since its beginning in January, 1905, I feel in some measure privileged to write a few words of approbation and criticism concerning its contents.

In the present age of vulgar taste and sordid realism it is a relief to peruse a publication such as The All-Story, which has ever been and still remains under the influence of the imaginative school of Poe and Verne.

The All-Story was a companion magazine to the Argosy, which Munsey had changed to an all-fiction magazine in October 1896. Lovecraft of course read the Argosy also, as we shall presently see, although perhaps not this early. Lovecraft in 1916 states a little sheepishly that ‘In 1913 I had formed the reprehensible habit of picking up cheap magazines like The Argosy to divert my mind from the tedium of reality’,³¹ but it is now evident that this is, at the very least, an equivocation as far as the All-Story is concerned. One further bit of evidence is the fact that full-page advertisements for the International Correspondence Schools regularly appear in the Argosy, and it is very likely from this source that Lovecraft learned of this organization and used its services around 1909. He also read the Popular Magazine (Street & Smith’s rival to the Argosy) about the period 1905–10.

What was the fascination of these magazines for Lovecraft? The letter quoted above supplies a part of the answer: they contained a significant amount of horror, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction—material that was already ceasing to appear in the standard ‘slick’ or literary magazines of the day. As Lovecraft states in 1932: ‘In general … the Munsey publications did more to publish weird fiction than any other magazine enterprise of the early 20th century.’³² Elsewhere he remarks that he ‘first began to notice’³³ the Black Cat (1895–1922) around 1904, and that that magazine and the All-Story ‘were the first source of contemporary weird material I ever stumbled on’.³⁴

The letter-column of the Argosy—entitled ‘The Log-Book’—had been established only in the February 1911 issue, and letters were initially slow to come in; but by the end of the year many letters (identified only by the initials of the writer and his or her city of residence) were being published, with running commentary by the editor. Lovecraft’s first published letter to the Munsey magazines appeared in the Argosy for November 1911.³⁵ His next letter, in the 8 February 1913 issue of the All-Story Cavalier, is a comment on Irvin S. Cobb’s magnificent tale of a half-man, half-fish hybrid, ‘Fishhead’.

In the fall of that year Lovecraft’s letter-writing campaign shifts back to the Argosy; but at the moment I wish to return to the letter of 1914 that I have already quoted, a letter of close to two thousand words, taking up nearly two full printed pages. It is a sort of grand summation of everything he liked in the magazine and an encapsulation of what he thought it stood for. One of the most notorious of its statements is its judgment as to the Argosy’s leading author: ‘At or near the head of your list of writers Edgar Rice Burroughs undoubtedly stands.’ Later in life Lovecraft seemed embarrassed at his juvenile (or not so juvenile: he was twentythree when he wrote this letter) fondness for Burroughs, and he sought to distance himself from the creator of Tarzan.

In his letter Lovecraft goes on to praise many other writers, few of whom are of any note. What is remarkable is that the writers mentioned here (as well as in a later letter published in the All-Story Cavalier Weekly for 15 August 1914) did not even write weird fiction. This means that Lovecraft read each issue—sometimes 192 pages, sometimes 240 pages—from cover to cover, month after month or even (when it changed to a weekly) week after week. This is an appalling amount of popular fiction for anyone to read, and in fact it contravened the purpose of the magazines, whereby each member of the family would read only those stories or those types of stories that were of interest to him or her.

It is possible that the All-Story published this long letter in its issue of 7 March 1914 because Lovecraft himself had become, after a fashion, a sort of celebrity in the entire Munsey chain. This had come about in a very odd way. Lovecraft, reading everything the Argosy put in front of him, found some material less appealing to his fastidious taste than others. In particular, a popular Argosy writer of sentimental romances named Fred Jackson was blasted by Lovecraft in the issue for September 1913. Jackson had become an Argosy staple, and two of his short novels had appeared complete in recent issues.

The response to Lovecraft’s letter is not likely to have been predicted either by Lovecraft or by Matthew White, Jr, editor of the Argosy. The November 1913 issue contained several more letters on Jackson, two of which specifically supported Jackson and attacked Lovecraft. The affair, however, might not have taken the peculiar turn it did had not the other letter, by John Russell of Tampa, Florida, been written in verse. This is a whimsical four-stanza piece which begins:

Does Mr. Lovecraft think it wise

With such long words to criticize

An author whom we greatly prize? That’s Freddie Jackson.

Lovecraft was so taken with this squib that he decided to reply in kind. The January 1914 issue contained a verse epistle of his own in what he fancied was the manner of Pope’s Dunciad. In fact, it is a very clever poem, and reveals that penchant for stinging satire which would be one of the few virtues of his poetic output. The manuscript of the poem is headed ‘Ad Criticos’ (‘To [my] critics’); in it Lovecraft praises Russell for his cleverness and wit, and then proceeds to take his other enemies to task.

But before Lovecraft’s verse letter was printed, he was ferociously assailed in the December 1913 issue. Some of the titles which the editor affixed to the letters give some idea of the outrage Lovecraft had provoked: ‘Challenge to Lovecraft’ (G. E. Bonner, Springfield, Ohio); ‘Virginia vs. Providence’ (Miss E. E. Blankenship, Richmond, Virginia); ‘Elmira vs. Providence’ (Elizabeth E. Loop, Elmira, New York); ‘Bomb for Lovecraft’ (F. W. Saunders, Coalgate, Oklahoma). Two letters did take Lovecraft’s side, however.

In a second instalment of ‘Ad Criticos’ published in the February 1914 Argosy Lovecraft takes potshots at these new opponents. The tone of this poem is much sharper than that of its predecessor. In this issue Lovecraft begins to gather both friends and enemies— mostly the latter.

The controversy continued desultorily for the next several issues; but something strange now happens: no more replies by Lovecraft are published in the Argosy until October 1914. There are two further segments of ‘Ad Criticos’ in manuscript: did he not submit them for publication? or were they not accepted? The latter seems unlikely, since an editorial note at the end of ‘Correction for Lovecraft’ (a prose letter published in the March 1914 issue) declares: ‘You are always welcome in the Log-Book.’

The controversy comes to an end in the October 1914 issue. An entire section of ‘The Log-Book’ bears the heading ‘Fred Jackson, Pro and Con’; inevitably, the ‘Jackson Boosters’ outnumber the ‘Jackson Knockers’. The most interesting item is a poem headed ‘The Critics’ Farewell’ and bearing both Lovecraft’s and Russell’s names. They did not actually collaborate on the poem; rather, Lovecraft wrote the first part (headed ‘The End of the Jackson War’) and Russell wrote the second (headed ‘Our Apology to E. M. W.’). Lovecraft’s, naturally, is in heroic couplets, and Russell’s is in very racy short and irregular anapaests. Lovecraft notes that this truce was made at the insistence of an editor at the Argosy, who ‘intimated that the poet’s war must soon end, since correspondents were complaining of the prominence of our verses in their beloved magazine’.³⁶

It is worth reflecting on what the whole Argosy/All-Story battle over Fred Jackson meant to Lovecraft. In a sense we owe thanks to Mr Jackson for making the rest of Lovecraft’s career possible, for there is no telling how long he would have continued to vegetate in the increasingly hothouse atmosphere of 598 Angell Street. Lovecraft had no job, was only toying with chemistry and astronomy, was living with a mother who was steadily losing her mental stability, was writing random undistinguished bits of verse about his native region, and was devouring the Munsey magazines but had no thought of contributing any fiction to them or to any other market. But Jackson’s work so irritated him that he emerged from his hermitry at least to the extent of bombarding letters to the magazines in question. While it was John Russell who initiated the habit of writing in verse, Lovecraft found it in a golden opportunity to adapt his beloved Augustan satire against a very modern target.

The principal immediate benefit of the Argosy experience was, of course, his discovery of—or, rather, by—the world of amateur journalism. Edward F. Daas, then Official Editor of the United Amateur Press Association, noticed the poetic battle between Lovecraft and Russell and invited both to join the organization. Both did so, Lovecraft officially enrolling on 6 April 1914. In a few years he would be transformed both as a writer and as a human being.

CHAPTER SIX

A Renewed Will to Live (1914–17)

The world of amateur journalism which Lovecraft entered in April 1914 with wide-eyed curiosity was a peculiar if rather fascinating institution. The papers produced by the members exhibited the widest possible range in content, format, style, and quality; in general they were quite inferior to the ‘little magazines’ of their day but considerably superior (both in typography and in actual literary content) to the science fiction and fantasy ‘fanzines’ of a later period, although few were so focused on a single topic as the fanzines were. Amateur journalism as a formal institution began around 1866, with a short-lived society being formed by the publisher Charles Scribner and others around 1869. This society collapsed in 1874, but in 1876 the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) definitively took form; it continues to exist today. In 1895 the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) was formed by William H. Greenfield (at that time only fourteen years old) and others who (as Lovecraft believed) wished for an organization more devoted to serious intellectual endeavour; it was this branch that Lovecraft joined. There still exists an alumni association of amateur journalists, The Fossils, who continue to issue a paper, The Fossil, on an irregular basis.

It is a sad fact that no one aside from Lovecraft himself has ever emerged from amateurdom to general literary recognition. This is not to say that others do not deserve to do so: the poetry of Samuel Loveman and Rheinhart Kleiner, the fiction of Edith Miniter (much of it professionally published), and the critical work of Ernest A. Edkins, James F. Morton, and Edward H. Cole need fear no comparison with their analogues in the standard literature of the day. It is, unfortunately, unlikely that much of this work will ever be revived or even taken note of except in connection with Lovecraft himself.

It was not required that amateur journalists produce their own journals. Indeed, no more than a fraction of the members ever did so, and some of these papers were extremely irregular. In most cases members would send contributions directly to editors of existing amateur journals or to two ‘Manuscript Bureaus’, one for the eastern part of the country, one for the western part; the managers of these bureaus would then dole out the manuscripts to journals in need of material. Individuals with printing apparatus were greatly in demand; indeed, NAPA was originally an organization not for disinterested littérateurs to excel in the art of self-expression but for youthful printers to practise the art of typography.