On June 12, 1889, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Tremont Street in Boston, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, and Sarah Susan Phillips were married. Right on time 9½ months later, in the morning on August 20, 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born, at 194 Angell Street, Providence, the home of his grandparents Phillips.
Winfield was a traveling salesman, or "commercial traveler" as the term then was, working for Gorham & Company, silversmiths of Providence, RI. He was well educated, always immaculately dressed, and spoke with a cultivated British accent - despite being born in Rochester, New York. Many researchers have labeled him as "pompous". How he met Sarah is unknown, but the fact that they were married in Boston, with church staff as witnesses, may indicate that the marriage was against the wishes of Sarah's parents, perhaps on account of their social status and, despite appearances, Winfield's lack thereof.
In early 1893, Winfield suffered a mental breakdown while on a business trip to Chicago, accusing hotel staff of insulting him and raping his wife (who was still in Providence), and had to be returned to Providence under restraint. He was admitted to Butler hospital on April 25, where he continued to deteriorate. The diagnosis of the hospital was one of "paresis", known today as tertiary neurosyphillis, the final stage of untreated syphilis. At the time of his admission to Butler Hospital, the connection between syphilis and paresis was only suspected (it wasn't proved until 1911) but it is quite probable that Sarah knew the sexual nature of the disease. Her subsequent strange attitude toward her son may well have been the result. Perhaps the earliest manifestation of this odd attitude was Sarah's refusal to dress Howard as a boy. While it was common in that era to dress infant and toddler boys in dresses, Sarah continued this practice far longer than was common; it was only when Howard was six and protested his girlish locks to his mother that she allowed them to be cut - she wept as they were shorn, and made a point of saving them.
Into the gap left in Howard's life by the incarceration of his father stepped his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833-1904). Whipple was a prominant businessman in Providence, starting his career running a general store in 1855, and by 1880 he had established the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company, which dammed the Snake River in Southwest Idaho, providing irrigation to the surrounding farms and orchards. In 1890, however, the dam washed out and had to be replaced at emourmous expense; by 1900 the company was bankrupt. Whipple bought out most of his partners and gave it another try.
The origins of Lovecraft's taste for the weird and fanstastical are in this period. In January 1896, his grandmother Robie Alzada Place Phillips died, an event which, according to Lovecraft in a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner dated November 16, 1916, "threw the household into a gloom from which it never fully recovered". The atmosphere was so grim that Lovecraft began suffering from nightmares of such intensity that he would, for the rest of his life, "experience a thrill of fear... & instinctively struggle to keep awake" whenever he felt himself falling asleep. Of all the nightmares he had for the remainder of his life, "even the worst is pallid beside the real 1896 product." It was, in fact, from these nightmares that he derived the "night-gaunts" that he later used in The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath.
About this same time Lovecraft came across the 1876 edition of Colridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Gustave Doré. Already familiar with Doré's work from his illustrations of Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost, Lovecraft was profoundly effected. Lovecraft himself dated the beginning of his literary career to 1896; the very first work of his that survives is "The Poem of Ulysses; or, The Odyssey: Written for Young People", an 88 line abstract of Pope's 14,000 line translation of Homer's Odyssey. Stylistically, Lovecraft's work owes more to Rime of the Ancient Mariner than to Pope's translation.
The Hellenic nature of his writings at this time reflect his fascination with the ancient world of Rome and Greece; he had discovered the ancient world in the pages of Nawthorne's The Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, with their Teutonized versions of ancient fables, and Bulfinch's The Age of Fable. He also read the 1717 edition of Garth's Ovid, an assemblage of translations of the Metamorphoses by various poets and authors, edited by Sir Samuel Garth. (Lovecraft's later fondness for the iambic pentameter also came from this work.) His love of the ancient world became so strong that he would build altars to Jove in the woods and even believe that he had seen satyrs and dryads. In a letter to R. Michael dated July 20, 1929, he would write....
"Mythology was my life-blood then, and I really almost believed in the Greek and Roman deities - fancying I could glimpse fauns and satyrs and dryads at twilight in those oaken groves where I am sitting now. When I was about 7 years old, my mythological fancy made me wish to be - not merely to see - a faun or a satyr. I used to try to imagine that the tops of my ears were beginning to get pointed, and that a trace of incipient horns was beginning to appear on my forehead - and bitterly lamented the fact that my feet were rather slow in turning into hooves!"
Winfield Scott Lovecraft died on July 19, 1898, when Howard was but one month short of eight years old. The death of his father does not seem to have made as strong an impression upon Howard as did the death of his grandmother three years earlier. This is to be expected, as Howard had not seen his father in five years - he had never been taken to visit his father in the hospital, having been told instead that his father was suffering from total paralysis and had been unconsious the whole time. This is manifestly not the case - the record abounds with descriptions of the deranged antics of the incarcerated Winfield - but Howard seems to have believed it.
The same year, Lovecraft discovered Poe - it is not certain exactly which story of Poe's was the first that Lovecraft read - and went on to write The Little Glass Bottle, The Secret Cave; or, John Lee's Adventure, The Mystery of the Graveyard; or, A Dead Man's Revenge. Of these, only The Noble Eavesdropper, since lost, can be classified as weird fiction, the others being adventures and detective stories; none appear to be strongly influenced by Poe. There were probably other stories as well, but they did not survive.
Lovecraft became interested in Chemistry by reading the section devoted to "Philosophical & Scientific Instruments" in the 1864 edition of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, a volume which remained in his library until his death. He was provided with a small laboratory in the basement where "despite a few mishaps, explosions, & broken instruments, I got along splendidly." His investigations lead to the writing of numerous treatises on chemistry, including the six volume Chemistry, which covered such divers subjects as explosives, batteries, and anesthetics. It is remarkable for someone of the age of eight to began teaching himself Latin, but with the help of his grandfather Whipple, that is just what Lovecraft did. The language stood him in good stead when his mother attempted to enroll him in dance classes, and he was able to respond with a quote from Cicero: "Nemo fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit!" ("Scarcely any sober person dances, unless by chance he is insane!") Also in 1898, Lovecraft entered Slater Avenue School at "the highest grade of primary school", forth or fifth grade, quite remarkable for a child of eight - his classmates would have been several years older than he. His first year in school was not a pleasant one, and it resulted in his first nervous breakdown, though little is known about it. He was withdrawn at the end of the year and did not re-enter school until 1902; in the interim, he neither attended school nor was tutored, being instead allowed to pursue his own interests.
Lovecraft was very slow to form friendships, but those few that he did make were long-lasting. He struck up a friendship with Chester and Harold Monroe, two brothers who lived at the corner of Patterson and Angell Streets, about four blocks away. It was Lovecraft's first real friendship with youths his own age, and of all the many remarkable escapades of these three, the "Providence Detective Agency" is the most interesting: This P.D.A. - whose members ranged between nine & fourteen in years, was a most wonderful thing - how many murders & robberies we unraveled! Our headquarters were in a deserted house just out of the thickly settled area, and we there enacted, and "solved", many a gruesome tragedy. I still remember my labours in producing artificial "bloodstains on the floor!!!" This enthusiasm - he read every Sherlock Homes tale published and took for himself the appelation "S. H." - showed in his writings, as he produced several detective stories around this time. Unfortunately, it does not appear that any survive. (It is an interesting illustration of how times have changed that Lovecraft, at the age of ten, was allowed to carry a revolver as part of this game: "...mine was the real thing, but Inspector Munroe (aet 12) had a water squirt-pistol, while Inspector Upham (aet 10) worried along with a cap-pistol...")
It may strike many as amusing that Lovecraft was a member of the "Blackstone Military Band". The others played the "zobo", probably a kazoo of sorts, while Lovecraft served in the position of drummer - on account of his "almost unique ability to keep time" - whilst clenching a zobo in his teeth and working a triangle and cymbols with his feet. The image of the future Master of Horror prancing around as a one-man-band is nothing short of hysteical.
The Railroads also enthralled Lovecraft. In 1901 he was one of the first passengers on the Warren & Bristol branch of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, and celebrated the event in a poem with the prodigious title of An Account in Verse of the Marvellous Adventures of H. Lovecraft, Esq. Whilst Traveling 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. This poem was Lovecraft's first attempt at humorous verse.
Lovecraft discovered astronomy in 1902; while astronomy courses were taught at Slater Avenue School, it does not appear that he took any of them, instead learning from books from his grandmother's library. He was immediatly given a series of ever-larger telescopes, the last being a 3" Bardon from Montgomery Wards costing $50 (a tidy sum in those days); this telescope he would retain for his entire life. He wrote a six-part treatis on the subject titled The Science Library, and four hectographed astronomical periodicals. The Planet, an interesting combination of dime-novel melodrama and science, was only printed in one edition (Lovecraft wrote "Notice! This number is only an experiment, possibly no more will be issued", and indeed none were). Astronomy and The Monthly Almanack were were published in several issues spanning the eight months after school let out in 1902. The most substantial periodical, however, was The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, which would be issued on and off until as late as 1909; 69 issues survive.
Lovecraft did not return to school in 1903, instead being taught at home by a series of tutors. It is not clear exactly why he did not return to school, but it seems likely that his nervous health was the cause. It appears that during this period, Lovecraft suffered from Chorea Minor, or St. Vitus's Dance, an adolescent form of Huntington's Disease. "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." Indeed, the twitches could be so violent as to launch him from his school chair to the floor.
In 1904, the Snake River Dam washed out again, destroying Whipple Phillips both financially and personally; news of the catastrophe effected him so badly that he died very shortly thereafter "of apoplexy", his grandson would later write. While Whipple Phillips had been alive, the Lovecraft family had been quite well off; after his death, however, the financial situation changed very much for the worse - the Lovecrafts were forced to sell the house (renumbered 454 Angell Street) and move to a cramped apartment at 598 Angell Street, three blocks away. It would remain Howard's life-long dream to buy 454 Angell Street and restore it to it's original glory, but it was not to be.
The loss of his grandfather and his childhood home was utterly devastating to Lovecraft. Perhaps this devestation this is best conveyed by a letter Lovecraft wrote to J. Vernon Shea on February 4, 1934:
"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?"
Lovecraft was so devastated it appears that he considered suicide. After considering various methods of destroying himself with scientific exactitude and eliminating each as unsuitable, he finally settled on drowning himself in the Barrington River River that forms the border between Rhode Island and Massachusets, and rode his bike there several times. How characteristic, then, that it was his thirst for knowledge that pulled him back: "...as I contemplated an exit without further knowledge I became uncomfortably conscious of what I didn't know. Tantalising gaps existed everywhere."
Lovecraft entered the Hope Street English and Classical High School in the fall of 1904, where his fears that it would be a "devilish bore" proved to be unfounded; his instructors recognized his intellect and "removed all restraint... I ceased to think of discipline, but merely comported myself as a gentleman among gentlemen." Nonetheless, he did have the occasional run-in with both his fellow students and his teachers: in one memorable incident, he was accused of plagerism by his English teacher, Mrs. Blake. He described the incident in a letter to Robert E. Howard (of Conan fame) in 1933.
"Did I deny the magazine-article charge? Not so! Instead, I calmly informed the lady that the theme was indeed a verbatim parallel of an article which had appeared in a rural weekly only a few days before. I felt sure, I said, that no one could possibly object to the parallelism! Indeed, I added - as the good soul's bewilderment became almost apoplectic - I would be glad to show her the printed article in question! Then, reaching in my pocket, I produced a badly printed cutting from a Rhode Island village paper (which would accept almost anything sent to it). Sure enough - here was the self same article. And mixed were the emotions of the honest Mrs. Blake when she perused the heading - CAN THE MOON BE REACHED BY MAN? BY H. P. LOVECRAFT."
This article, Can the Moon be Reached by Man?, was published in the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner on October 12, 1906. Lovecraft published many astronomical articles in local papers, writing regular columns in both the Gleaner and the Providence Tribune. Lovecraft would later write "During 1906-1908 I flooded the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner with my prose articles," though none later than 1906 survive. He had begun his contributions to newspapers with a letter to the editor printed in the June 3 issue of the Providence Sunday Journal in June, wherein he corrected an error made by an astrologer. Only two months later he wrote a letter to Scientific American which was published in August 1906 as "Trans-Neptunian Planets".
Lovecraft ended his school career with a nervous breakdown in 1908, without graduating, though it is not clear exactly why. One possibility is that once it had become clear that he simply did not have the math skills for a career in science - he had only barely passed Elemetary Algebra and had taken Intermediate Algebra twice - his dissapointment had been simply too bitter to bear. Another possibility is that he suffered a head injury at this time, though only anecdotal evidence for this conjecture exists. In any event, his failure to graduate and go on to Brown University would prove to be a source of life-long embarassment, and resulted in years of apathy and withdrawl.
IV. The Hermit Period
Little is known about Lovecraft from 1908 to 1913. This is perhaps from this period that the oft-repeated charge of "eccentric recluse" or "hermit" derives. He "shunned all human society, deeming myself too much of a failure in life to be seen socially by those who had known me in youth, & had foolishly expected such great things of me." I believe him to have been clinically depressed. Very little of note took place in Lovecraft's life during this period. He suffered through a near-fatal bout of measles, observed and wrote about Halley's comet, and attended the Providence Opera House often. He took, but never completed, a correspondence chemistry course. He wrote sporadically in his chemistry and astronomy journals, and wrote an astronomy column for Providence Evening News; he didn't write any fiction during this period, and what he did write he would later describe as "uniformly worthless and now relegated to eternal concealment."
Yet despite his later claims to hermitry, he did not entirely isolate himself; he continued to meet with the East Side Historical Club, consisting of a half-dozen young men from the neighborhood and at which Lovecraft was often the speaker of the evening. He also (probably at his mother's urging) joined the Men's Club of the First Universalist Church of Providence. But most importantly, he read lots of pulps and dime novels. One such publication, the Argosy, published an author by the name of Fred Jackson, who's incredibly lurid tales so inflamed Lovecraft that he wrote a letter to Matthew White, Jr, the editor, attacking Jackson. Other readers responded, counter-attacking Lovecraft. A flame war had begun.
It may well be that the world owes John Russell of Tampa, Florida, a tremedous debt. For, had Mr. Russell not put an unusual twist on the ensuing epistolary battle, the world may never have heard of H. P. Lovecraft. Russell put a new twist on things when submitted a letter to the editor attacking Lovecraft in verse.
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 that he resolved to respond in kind, and submitted Ad Criticos: Liber Primus (so named later), in which Lovecraft tips his hat to Russell for his wit... and then levels him.
What vig'rous protests now assail my eyes? See Jackson's satellites in anger rise! His ardent readers, steep'd in tales of love, Sincere devotion to their leader prove; In brave defence of sickly gallantry, They damn the critic, and beleaguer me!
Of course, Jackson's supporters could not let this go unanswered, and the next issue of Argosy was full of vehement attacks on Lovecraft. But Lovecraft was in his element, far more educated and eloquent than his opponents, and responded with the devastating Liber Secundus. This continued well into 1914 before the editor of Argosy insisted on calling a truce; a poem titled The Critics Farewell, by both Lovecraft and Russell (each independantly wrote half) closed the issue. In itself this unusual battle, though interesting, was insignificant - shortly thereafter, Lovecraft was involved in a very similar controversy with Jochaim Friedrich Hartmann over astrology in the Providence Evening News. What makes the Argosy controversy a pivotal point in Lovecraft's life is that it was noticed by Edward F. Daas, Official Editor of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited Lovecraft to join.
V. Amateur Publishing
Lovecraft joined the UAPA on April 16, 1914, and participated with enthusiasm, contributing essays and poems to many different amateur journals. His first essay contribution was "A Task for Amateur Journalists", which perhaps contributed to his appointment as Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism in November 1914. His duties in that capacity were to critique in detail the various works of the other members, and in this capacity he undertook to raise the literary standards of the UAPA. In July 1915, Lovecraft was elected First Vice-President of the UAPA; his duties included heading the commitee for recruiting, and collecting "credentials", sample works of new members, for publication. He continued to serve as Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism, as he did again in 1916, when he was offered the position of Official Editor; he declined.
It was in November of 1916 that Lovecraft's first piece of fiction was published: The Alchemist, written eight years earlier. In his capacity of Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism, he critiqued the tale mercilessly; nevertheless, the tale received a favorable response. This response, combined with the urging of his good friend W. Paul Cook, inspired Lovecraft to try his hand at writing fiction for the first time since 1908: over the summer he wrote The Tomb and Dagon. In May 1917 Lovecraft was appointed to the position of Official Editor when the existing Editor, Andrew Lockhart, resigned (to serve a prison sentance; he was allegedly framed for his activities in the prohibition movement). In July, Lovecraft was elected President of the United Amatuer Press Association, a position he would hold until 1922.
Lovecraft strongly supported the United States involvement in World War I, so much so that in 1917, before the draft was instituted, he attempted to enlist in the Rhode Island National Guard; he had actually succeeded until his mother interfered and managed, with the assistance of the family doctor, to get his enlistment revoked on account of his health. There is every reason to believe that Lovecraft's poor health was actually the result of his mother's suggestive influence - she was forever fussing over him and telling him how frail he was, and eventually he had come to believe it. When W. Paul Cook visited Lovecraft in September of 1917, he would later write that "Every few minutes Howard's mother, or his aunt, or both, peeped into the room to see if he had fainted...". Yet Lovecraft had passed the physical examination without trouble when he attempted to enlist.
1918 saw the publication of The Beast in the Cave in Cook's Vagrant. Cook was a member of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA); the UAPA had split in 1912 as a result of a contested election, with the losers forming the NAPA, with a great rivalry, bordering on hostitiliy, between the two associations. Though Lovecraft was a staunch UAPA supporter - he considered the NAPA to be an organization of politicians and "has-beens" - and Cook served as the NAPA Official Editor and President, the two struck up a friendship that lasted for the rest of Lovecraft's life. Lovecraft appointed Cook as the UAPA Official Printer, and Cook published Dagon in his Vagrant in November of 1919. In 1918, Lovecraft wrote Polaris. The following year, he discovered the works of Lord Dunsany, whose dreamy, fantastic, surreal style Polaris mirrored surprisingly closely, and was inspired to write several stories in the Dunsanian style over the next several years. He did not turn his back on weird fiction, however, writing also several works in that genre, including The Statement of Randolph Carter, the first appearance of Randolph Carter, who would become to be considered at Lovecraft's alter ego. Perhaps the most unusual of his works of this period are his first revisions, The Green Meadow and The Crawling Chaos with Winifred Virginia Jackson. In and of themselves, these stores are actually pretty poor; what makes them interesting is that Lovecraft seems to have been romantically involved with Ms. Jackson - if so, it shows how far he had come since the hermit days of 1908-1913.
VI. Death
Lovecraft's mother, always very class-consious, had been gradually crumbling under the stress of near-poverty and become more and more neurotic. She began to see "weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark"x. She finally had a nervous breakdown in January of 1919, and spent two months visiting her sister Lillian Clark at 135 Benefit street (the scene of The Shunned House). Lovecraft was quite upset by her breakdown - he put his feelings into words in the poem Despair. The vacation didn't help, and she was admitted to Butler Hospital on March 13, 1919.
I can't help but wonder if Lovecraft and his mother hadn't had a falling out of sorts that had lead to her having a breakdown. There is, of course, no hard evidence to support this theory - Lovecraft would hardly have mentioned it in his letters - but consider the following (extremely) circumstantial evidence:
Lovecraft wrote to her daily at 135 Benefit St, even though he could easily have walked there. Perhaps he wasn't welcome? He did not visit his monther in the hospital at all at first (summer and winter of 1919). Maybe he wasn't welcome there, either. Their disagreement must have lasted until the spring of 1920, when amends must have been made and he started visiting her again.
As for what caused the rift, I would venture that it was, perhaps, Lovecraft's intention to attend Amateur Journalism meetings in Boston during the winter of 1919 that caused the rift. His mother had never approved of Amateur Journalism, finding it too "democratic", and she would have objected strongly to Lovecraft's desire to, in her mind, put his life at risk (she considered him an invalid, recall) by venturing to Boston in the dead of winter - such news might have effected her almost as badly as the news of his enlistment in 1917. Unlike 1917, though, it is likely that, in view of Lovecraft's feelings about Amateurdom, he would not have allowed himself to be pursuaded to forgo the meetings.
It would be interesting to read the corespondence between Lovecraft and his mother during this period.
His coorespondance with Winifred Jackson petered out at this time; S. T. Joshi raises the very real possibility that Lovecraft's mother may have been the driving force between that relationship, though he is skeptical that any relationship actually existed. In his last letter to Jackson, Lovecraft included a picture of his mother, and wrote "...her youthful pictures would form close rivals to your own in a contest for aesthetic supremacy." One can only wonder what he was thinking.
It is not certain when in 1921 Lovecraft wrote The Outsider, but it expresses a depressing hopelessness that makes me wonder if it wasn't written in response to his mother's death. It is unfortunate that it is one of Lovecraft's better-known tales; while it is an excellent tale, it is not really representative of the rest of his work.
As crushed as Lovecraft was by the loss of his mother, he did not collapse utterly as he had in 1908 upon the death of his Grandfather Whipple. By July 1921, he was "back on his feet" and attending the national NAPA conference in Boston.
VII. Juno Cometh
It was at this convention that Lovecraft was introduced to the beautiful and statelyx Sonia H. Greene. She had been born in Ichnya, Russia (Ukraine) on March 16, 1883 to Simyon and Racille Haft Sharfirkin; her family had emigrated to England, and then to the United States in 1892. She had married Samuel Seckendorff in 1899, at the age of 16, and gave birth to a daughter, Florence, in 1902. Her husband later changed his name to Greene. Samuel was apparently abusive to her, and they separated; he committed suicide in 1916. Educated at Columbia University, Sonia held an executive position with Ferle Heller's, women's clothing manufacturer in New York City, earning as $10,000 a year x. Greene was apparently quite smitten with Lovecraft - though, as she would later write, "I admired his personality, but frankly, at first, not his person." Probably a natural reaction by one steeped in the world of fashion to a tall, gaunt, stuffy, acne-prone man, seven years her junior, and who wore hideously out-of-fashion suits. Still, upon her return home to her apartment at 259 Parkside Ave in the fashionable Flatbush (Brooklyn), New York, she immediately wrote him.
Lovecraft, for his part, found her attractive and "a welcome addition to the United's philosophical arena", yet was not as smitten as she. When she visited Providence in September, Lovecraft gave her an antiquarian tour of the city; she treated Lovecraft and his Aunt Lillian to lunch. Before her return to New York, she invited Lovecraft to join that little circle of friends in New York that would eventually become the Kalem Club; this he did in May of 1922, meeting Samuel Loveman and Frank Long, with whom he had long corresponded but had never met in person.
Greene visited Providence again in June, while traveling on business, and persuaded Lovecraft to visit Magnolia and Glouchester with her; he spent a week in the region, and it was there that the stories The Horror at Martin's Beach - which appeared in the November 1923 issue of Weird Tales - and Four O'Clock, and possibly a third, took form.
VIII. Professional Publication
In September 1921, Lovecraft undertook his first paid publication, Herbert West: Reanimator, for a George Julian Hautain who had started the magazine Home Brew. Lovecraft was commissioned to write six installments of around 2000 words each, and was paid the tidy sum of $5x per installment - not as much as he'd make from Weird Tales later, but a fair amount. Lovecraft called the stories "manifestly unartistic", but seems to have enjoyed writing them. While at work on this series - which took him nine months to complete - he also wrote Hypnos and The Music of Erich Zann. Zann was his second favorite story, after The Colour out of Space, because "it isn't as bad as most of the rest"; it lacked the over-rationalization and theatrics of some of his earlier works. Indeed, it is very subtle, almost to a fault.
In 1922 Lovecraft started on his first novel-length work, Azathoth. The theme was intended to be "imagination is the great refuge", written in the style of History of the Caliph Vathek, without division into chapters. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long dated June 9, 1922, he wrote: .....Probably I 'll never finish it - possibly I'll never even get a chapter written - but it amuses me just now to pretend to myself that I'm going to write it.
He never finished the tale, but a fragment was found amongst his papers after his death. He would later write The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath in both the theme and the style intended for Azathoth.
1922 saw Lovecraft finally break into professional writing. He had submitted Dagon to Black Cat in 1919, and The Tomb to Black Mask, without success. At the urging of his friends, most notably Everett MCneil and James F. Morton, he submitted five tales to a new magazine by the title of Weird Tales: The Hound, Arthur Jermyn, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Cats of Ulthar, and Dagon. They were rejected one and all, for no other reason than that Lovecraft had not typed them properly - single spaced instead of double spaced. Edwin Baird, editor of Weird Tales, told Lovecraft that he liked the stories and would like to see them again in the proper format, but Lovecraft couldn't be bothered. Eventually, he did retype Dagon and resubmit it; it was promptly purchased and published in the October 1923 issue of Weird Tales. The others soon followed. By July, 1922, Lovecraft's attempts to raise the literary standards of the UAPA had irritated many of the members to such an extent that he and all his associates were voted out of office by a huge margin in July.
In August of 1922, Lovecraft began his antiquarian travels; in time, he would visit most of the east coast, from Florida to Quebec, breaking free of the reclusion imposed upon him by his mother. He started with a remarkable three-month vacation, visiting Sonia Greene in New York for a few days, proceeding to Cleveland where he stayed with Alfred Galpin for two weeks, and then returning to New York and Ms. Greene for the remainder of the period.
Lovecraft returned to Providence in November, and began work on The Lurking Fear, also for Home Brew. Later the same month, he was appointed interim President of the NAPA, after the elected President resigned.
In December, Lovecraft visited Salem, Marblehead, and the surrounding Massachusetts area; he was so captivated by the 17th century architecture of these towns that he visited them four times over the next five months, and was inspired to write The Festival. Greene visited Lovecraft in Providence in July of 1923, and together they visted Narragansett. In August, Maurice W. Moe visited, and later Lovecraft visited Portsmouth, NH. In September, he visited Marblehead and Chepachet with James F. Morton. It almost seems as if his reclusion had given way to a kind of hyperactivity.
Lovecraft served as president of the NAPA for only a year before the "anti-literati" party of the UAPA was ousted, and Lovecraft's faction was voted back into office in a landslide as great as that of the previous year. Unfortunately, the losing faction resorted to obstructionist tactics which crippled the UAPA; no convention was held in 1924, and by 1926 the UAPA was dead.
Meanwhile, Jacob Clark Henneberger, publisher of Weird Tales, which was foundering badly, included a column by Harry Houdini in an effort to boost sales. Entitled "Ask Houdini", the column appeared in the March through May/June/July 1924 issues. Houdini's name also appeared on three stories, "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" (same issues), "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" (April 1924), and "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" (May/June/July 1924). All were written by ghost-writers; history has not recorded who wrote the first two, but the last was written by Lovecraft. Although the story was originally supposed to be published under both Lovecraft's and Houdini's name, Lovecraft unexpectedly wrote it in the first person, resulting in the story being published under Houdini's name alone. The story wasn't identified with Lovecraft for years.
Paid $100 in advance for the story, Lovecraft waited until the last minute to write it, and then lost the manuscript in the train station on the way to New York to deliver it. He took out an ad in the Providence Journal, from which we learn that the title he had given it was Under the Pyrmaids.
IX. The Unholy City: New York
Upon his arrival in New York, and much to the surprise of everyone, Lovecraft married Sonia Greene on the 3rd of March 1924, promptly moving into her apartment at 259 Parkside Ave. He had told no one of his plans, not even his aunts, who were informed by letter six days later; he claimed to them that he didn't want any "sentimental spoofing" or "'talking over' that radical steps always prompt among mortals", and he told Sonia that he preferred to surprise them, but it is more likely he knew that they didn't approve of the marriage. Sonia wasn't the New England Yankee aristocrat they would have preferred, but a foreign-born business-woman, and a Jew. Having lost the manuscript to Under the Pyramids, and already two days late for the deadline, he was forced to spend his wedding night and the night after rewriting and retyping it from his notes. It was an inauspicious beginning to their marriage.
The new couple was confident of their future: money was coming in from Weird Tales, Sonia's income was substantial, and Henneberger was so impressed with Under the Pyramids that he offered Lovecraft the editorship of Weird Tales. Lovecraft also had good prospects at a magazine titled The Reading Lamp. Yet, within months, everything had changed. Sonia had quit her job and started her own business, a hat shop, which was a fiasco. Unbelievably, Lovecraft dithered for months over the Weird Tales editorship, eventually losing the job to Farnsworth Wright. The prospects at The Reading Lamp came to nothing. Money became so very tight that they defaulted on a loan for property in Bryn Mawr Park, in Yonkers, where they had intended to build a house.
Lovecraft efforts to find a job were fruitless, with one exception, the only job he ever held - a salesman for the Creditor's National Clearing House in New Jersey, though he lasted for only two day, Monday July 28, and Wednesday July 30, 1924; he made not a single sale. In October of 1925, Lovecraft visited and became enthralled with the colonial antiquities of Elizabeth, New Jersey. This visit provided the inspiration for The Shunned House, his first piece of fiction since moving to New York City. He spent the 16th through the 20th writing and revising this tale.
Later that evening, things suddenly went from bad to worse: Sonia suffered a nervous breakdown and spent almost two weeks in the Brooklyn hospital. Lovecraft visited her every day in the hospital, even learning to play chess to entertain her. Her absence represented the first time in Lovecraft's life that he was without a woman to take care of him - he was forced to learn to cook. After her release from the hospital, she spent a week in Sommerville, New Jersey, recovering in the countryside. Lovecraft visited Philadelphia while she was away.
Upon her return, Sonia accepted a job offer at Mabley & Carew's Department Store in Cincinnati. Lovecraft had put all of Sonia's furniture in storage and moved to a smaller, cheaper, apartment at 169 Clinton Street in December of 1924. Sonia joined him there breifly in February of 1925, when she had either lost or quit her job in Cincinnati. Still suffering from the effects of her October breakdown, she took a rest of several weeks in a private home in Saratoga Springs, New York, she seems to have earned her keep by serving as a nanny beginning in April. Sonia returned to Brooklyn in earily June, and in late July got a job in Cleveland. This whole time Lovecraft had been seeking a job in New York, without success; depressed, his efforts became less and less vigorous until at last he was only responding to tips from his friends.
Lovecraft's continued effort - and continued failure - to find employment, and the resulting abject poverty, put him under a severe strain. "...advertisement answering ... has become such a psycological strain that I almost fall unconscious over it!" he wrote to his aunt Lillian. His only relief from the continued stress of unemployment and poverty was his circle of friends, which became unofficially known as the Kalem Club, as all the founding members - Rheinhart Kleiner, Frank Belknap Long, James F. Morton, and Lovecraft himself - all had last names that began with either K, L, or M, as did many others who later joined. The club met weekly throughout 1924 and '25, often into the small hours.
On May 24th, 1925, Lovecraft's apartment had been robbed while he slept on the couch. The thieves entered from an adjoining apartment and took three suits, an overcoat, a wicker suitcase (the contents of which were later recovered), and a radio. No doubt, this loss contributed to Lovecraft's loathing of New York City and it's population of "beady-eyed, rat-faced asiatics" and "mongrels", "these filthy rabble that infext the N.Y. streets". His racism, always great, grew to positively pathalogical levels. Sonia wrote: Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds that characterize New York, Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind.
His feelings found expression in August in The Horror at Red Hook and especially He. The latter is one of Lovecraft's most vitriolic stories, and to a great extent, it is autobiographical.
He begins:
My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration ... I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters ... Garish daylight showed only squalor and alienage ... swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart. Both stories end with rather piteous, if blatant, with-fulfillment. In Red Hook the hero leaves New York and goes to Chepachet; Lovecraft had visited Chepachet on an antiquarian visit in August of 1923 with James F. Morton, and no doubt wished he could return to that better time. In He, the narrator returns home to the "pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening", a plain reference to Providence. Lovecraft desperately wanted to go home.
Return to Providence
Lovecraft returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, at the invitation of his aunt Lillian. He and his aunt rented an apartment at 10 Barnes Street, near Brown University.
The obvious question is: if Lovecraft hated New York so, why did wait so long before returning to Providence? In He, he wrote "[I] refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat." But that could only have been a small part of his reasons for staying. He wanted Sonia to move to Providence with him, which she could not do for employment reasons, both there being no position for her available, and also resistance from Lovecraft's aunts - they could not face the shame of having the wife of a Lovecraft support them. Sonia later wrote:
...neither they nor Howard could afford to have Howard's wife work for a living in Providence. ... Pride preferred to suffer in silence; both theirs and mine.
A third factor was money - it was expensive to pack up everything he owned and ship it to Providence, and on his very limited budget, he could not afford it. In the end, either aunt Lillian or Sonia (reports differ) paid for the move. But whatever the reason, Lovecraft had finally come home, and the crushing depression that had stifled him in New York left him. W. Paul Cook visited him as he unpacked, and wrote of him "He was so happy he hummed - if he had possessed the necessary apparatus he would have purred."
Lovecraft's return to Providence was followed by a tremendous outburst in writing: he quickly produced a whole slew of stories, starting with finishing The Call of Cthulhu, which was destined to become his most famous story. This period also saw the writing of the novel-length stories The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Colour out of Space. These three tales really illustrate how Lovecraft hamstrung himself as a writer.
Despite the incredible effort that had done into The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - Kadath is 42,000 words, and Charles Dexter Ward is 46,000 - Lovecraft would never submit either to a publisher. Instead, he let them gather dust; eventually, the pages became separated, scattered, and lost. Only the efforts of August Derleth saved them - after Lovecraft's death Derleth laborously reassembled the manuscripts from bits and pieces recovered from various Lovecraft correspondants. Charles Dexter Ward was eventually published in Weird Tales in May 1941, and Derleth published Kadeth in Beyond the Wall of Sleep in 1943.
The Colour out of Space was rejected by Weird Tales on account of its length, but Lovecraft was trying to find alternate markets for his work. He had submitted stories to Ghost Stories and Detective Tales, without success, and now sent The Colour out of Space to Amazing Stories, where it was accepted and appeared in the September 1927 issue. Having found a new market, one would expect Lovecraft to have submitted The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - yet Amazing Stories paid so poorly (and so late) that Lovecraft never again bothered to submit to Amazing Stories.
In October, Houdini performed in Providence, and while in town asked Lovecraft to ghost-write an article debunking astrology, paying $75 for the piece. He also engaged Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy to ghost-write a book to be titled The Cancer of Superstition, but Houdini's unfortunate death on October 31st aborted the project.
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