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

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).