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

Lovecraft’s own career as a practising fiction-writer was certainly not going very well. In late June Julius Schwartz, evidently intent on following up the success of placing At the Mountains of Madness with Astounding, had proposed what Lovecraft considered a wild and impractical idea of placing some of his stories in England. Lovecraft sent him ‘a lot of manuscripts’²⁰ (leading one to think that Schwartz may have intended to approach book publishers), and, in order to exhaust the American market for as-yet unpublished stories, Lovecraft finally submitted ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ and ’The Haunter of the Dark’ to Weird Tales—the first stories he had personally submitted since he sent in ‘In the Vault’ in 1932. Lovecraft claimed to be surprised that Farnsworth Wright accepted these stories immediately, but he should not have been. Readers of the magazine had been clamouring for his work for years, and had to be satisfied with reprints.

In fact, Lovecraft had reached a psychological state that made both the marketing and the writing of fiction nearly impossible. As early as February 1936—three months after the writing of his last original tale, ‘The Haunter of the Dark’, and several months before the contretemps over his stories in Astounding—he was already admitting:

[ At the Mountains of Madness] was written in 1931—and its hostile reception by Wright and others to whom it was shewn probably did more than anything else to end my effective fictional career. The feeling that I had failed to crystallise the mood I was trying to crystallise robbed me in some subtle fashion of the ability to approach this kind of problem in the same way—or with the same degree of confidence and fertility.²¹ Lovecraft is already speaking of his fictional career in the past tense.

It is difficult to know exactly when Lovecraft realized that he was dying. The summer of 1936 finally brought the temperature up to a level where he could actually enjoy being outdoors and have the energy to accomplish his work. The fall saw him still taking long walks, resulting in his seeing several sections of his native city he had never before seen in his life. One expedition—on 20 and 21 October—took him to the east shore of Narragansett Bay, in an area called the Squantum Woods. On 28 October Lovecraft went to an area of the Neutaconkanut woods three miles northwest of College Hill.

Christmas was a festive occasion. Lovecraft and Annie had a tree, and the two of them had dinner at the boarding-house next door. Lovecraft received a gift which he certainly did not expect but which he professed to find delightful: a long-interred human skull, found in an Indian graveyard and sent to him by Willis Conover. Conover has received much criticism for sending this item at this time, but of course he could not have known of the state of Lovecraft’s health; and Lovecraft’s pleasure at receiving this mortuary relic seems quite sincere. The entire winter was unusually warm, allowing Lovecraft to continue neighbourhood walks into December and even January. Various letters of this time certainly bespeak no intimations of mortality.

In early January, however, Lovecraft admitted to feeling poorly—’grippe’ and bad digestion, as he put it. By the end of the month he was typing his letters—always a bad sign. Then, in midFebruary, he told Derleth that he had had an offer (of which nothing is known) for a revised version of some old astronomical articles (presumably the Asheville Gazette-News series), which caused him to unearth his old astronomy books and explore new ones. He added at the end of this letter: ‘Funny how early interests crop up again toward the end of one’s life.’²²

Lovecraft was at this time finally receiving the attention of a doctor, who prescribed three separate medications. On 28 February he made a feeble response to Talman’s continued queries about a book deal from William Morrow: ‘Am in constant pain, take only liquid food, and so bloated with gas that I can’t lie down. Spend all time in chair propped with pillows, and can read or write only a few minutes at a time.’²³ Two days later Harry Brobst, who was much on the scene during this time, wrote to Barlow: ‘Our old friend is quite ill—and so I am writing this letter for him. He has seemed to grow progressively weaker the last few days.’²⁴ On a postcard sent to Willis Conover on 9 March, Lovecraft writes in pencil: ‘Am very ill & likely to be so for a long time.’²⁵

The nature of Lovecraft’s various illnesses is not well understood, at least in terms of their aetiology. This may be because Lovecraft waited so long to have them examined by a competent medical authority. On his death certificate the principal cause of death was given as ‘Carcinoma of small intestine’; a contributory cause was ‘chronic nephritis’, or kidney disease.