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

The story was apparently submitted to Astounding Stories, Blue Book, Argosy, Wonder Stories, and perhaps Amazing Stories. Finally it was published in Weird Tales for October 1939.

Less than a month after Lovecraft recovered from his bout of ‘grippe’, he reported to his correspondents that his aunt Annie was stricken with a much severer case, one that ultimately involved hospitalization (beginning 17 March), then a two-week stay at a private convalescent home (7–21 April). Here is one more of the relatively few occasions in which Lovecraft is guilty of deceit, but in this case it is entirely understandable. In fact, Annie Gamwell was suffering from breast cancer, and her hospital stay involved a mastectomy. It is not a subject someone like Lovecraft would wish to discuss openly even to close associates.

The result for Lovecraft was a complete disruption of his schedule. At one point he states rather harrowingly: ‘My own programme is totally shot to pieces, & I am about on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I have so little power of concentration that it takes me about an hour to do what I can ordinarily do in five minutes—& my eyesight is acting like the devil.’⁸

The one thing Annie’s illness and hospital stay brought out was the severe state of the family finances—something made graphically real by one of the saddest documents ever written by Lovecraft, a diary that he kept while Annie was away and which he would bring to her every few days in order to give an account of his activities.⁹ Here we receive an unvarnished account of the severe economies—especially in food—which Lovecraft was compelled to practise at this time.

On 20 March we learn that Lovecraft had gone back to a bad habit of Clinton Street days—eating canned food cold—for we now hear of his ‘experiment[ing] with heating’ a can of chile con carne. It gets worse. On March 22 some twenty-minute eggs plus half a can of baked beans make ‘a sumptuous repast’. Around 24 March Lovecraft feels the necessity to use canned goods that had been lying around for at least three years, since they had been brought over from Barnes Street. On 29 March he begins using up some old Chase & Sanborn coffee that would otherwise go bad, even though he likes Postum better. Dinner on 30 March was cold hot dogs, biscuits, and mayonnaise.

On 10 April Lovecraft began experimenting with a tin of tenyear-old Rich’s Cocoa and found that it had ‘acquired an earthy taste’: ‘However, I shall use it up somehow.’ He was true to his word: over the next three days he mixed it with condensed milk and resolutely drank it. Afterward he found a tin of Hershey’s Cocoa, a nearly full container of salt from Barnes Street, and a can of diced carrots on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet and set these down for eventual use, also beginning to eat some old canned brown bread, which seemed all right.

The entire effect of all this economizing and eating of old and possibly spoiled food can only be conjectured. Is it any wonder that on 4 April Lovecraft admits to feeling so tired during the middle of the day that he had to rest instead of going out, and that on 13 April he finds, after a nap, that ‘I was too weak & drowsy to do anything’? It should, of course, be emphasized that the meals prepared during this period did not represent his normal eating habits, although these were ascetic enough. I shall have more to say about this later.

At exactly this point, Lovecraft was distracted by another debacle that nearly drove him to give up writing altogether. In midFebruary he had seen the first instalment of At the Mountains of Madness in the February 1936 Astounding and professed to like it; in particular, he had words of praise for the interior illustrations by Howard Brown. But the attractiveness of the illustrations soon soured when Lovecraft actually studied the text.

When he consulted the third and last instalment (April 1936), he discovered the serious tampering that the Astounding editors had performed on the story, particularly the last segment. Lovecraft went into a towering rage:

But hell & damnation! … In brief, that goddamn’d dung of a hyaena Orlin Tremaine has given the ‘Mts.’ the worst hashing-up any piece of mine ever received—in or out of Tryout! I’ll be hanged if I can consider the story as published at all—the last instalment is a joke, with whole passages missing …

I pass over certain affected changes in sentence-structure, but see red again when I think of the paragraphing. Venom of Tsathoggua! Have you seen the damn thing? All my paragraphs cut up into little chunks like the juvenile stuff the other pulp hacks write. Rhythm, emotional modulations, & minor climactic effects thereby destroyed … Tremaine has tried to make ‘snappy action’ stuff out of old-fashioned leisurely prose …