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

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