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

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