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

One would like to date Lovecraft’s second ‘near-breakdown’ to the termination of these lessons, but he clearly asserts that the first occurred in 1898 and the second in 1900. In any event, Lovecraft manifestly continued to be under considerable nervous strain—a situation in part relieved and in part augmented by his first attempt at school attendance, from which he was withdrawn after a year’s term (1898–99). Indeed, his casual remark in 1929 that ‘I spent the summer of 1899 with my mother’²⁶ in Westminster, Massachusetts, must lead one to speculate on the purpose of such a trip, and to wonder whether health reasons were a factor. I am inclined to connect the trip with the trauma of his first year of school and also of his violin lessons, which probably ended in the summer of 1899.

From all that has gone before it will be evident that Lovecraft led a comparatively solitary young childhood, with only his adult family members as his companions. Many of his childhood activities— reading, writing, scientific work, practising music, even attending the theatre—are primarily or exclusively solitary, and we do not hear much about any boyhood friends until his entrance into grade school. All his letters discussing his childhood stress his relative isolation and loneliness:

You will notice that I have made no reference to childish friends & playmates—I had none! The children I knew disliked me, & I disliked them. I was used to adult company & conversation, & despite the fact that I felt shamefully dull beside my elders, I had nothing in common with the infant train. Their romping & shouting puzzled me. I hated mere play & dancing about—in my relaxations I always desired plot.²⁷

One confirmation of this comes from the recollections of Lovecraft’s second cousin Ethel M. Phillips (1888–1987), later Mrs Ethel Phillips Morrish. Ethel, two years older than Lovecraft, was living with her parents Jeremiah W. Phillips (the son of Whipple’s brother James Wheaton Phillips) and his wife Abby in various suburbs of Providence during the 1890s, and was sent over to play with young Howard. She confessed in an interview conducted in 1977 that she did not much care for her cousin, finding him eccentric and aloof. She was particularly vexed because Lovecraft did not know how a swing worked. But she does have a delightful image of Lovecraft, at about the age of four, turning the pages of some monstrously huge book in a very solemn and adult manner.²⁸ Lovecraft provides one remarkable glimpse of some of the solitary games he played as a young boy:

My favourite toys were very small ones, which would permit of their arrangement in widely extensive scenes. My mode of play was to devote an entire table-top to a scene, which I would proceed to develop as a broad landscape … helped by occasional trays of earth or clay. I had all sorts of toy villages with small wooden or cardboard houses, & by combining several of them would often construct cities of considerable extent & intricacy … Toy trees—of which I had an infinite number—were used with varying effect to form parts of the landscape . . . even forests (or the suggested edges of forests). Certain kinds of blocks made walls & hedges, & I also used blocks in constructing large public buildings … My people were mainly of the lead-soldier type & magnitude—frankly too large for the buildings which they presumably tenanted, but as small as I could get. I accepted some as they were, but had my mother modify many in costume with the aid of knife & paint-brush. Much piquancy was added to my scenes by special toy buildings like windmills, castles, &c.

But there was more to it than just a static landscape; with his inveterate feel for plot, and his already developing sense of time, history, and pageantry, Lovecraft would actually act out historical scenarios with his miniature cities. He adds significantly: ‘Horrorplots were frequent, though (oddly enough) I never attempted to construct fantastic or extra-terrestrial scenes. I was too much of an innate realist to care for fantasy in its purest form.’²⁹ Lovecraft does not give an explicit date for the commencement of this fascinating exercise, but I suspect it dates to his seventh or eighth birthday.

Although Lovecraft may have been solitary, he was by no means devoted merely to indoor activities. The year 1900 saw the commencement of his career as bicyclist, something he would keep up for more than a decade. Late in life he claimed that he was a ‘veritable bike-centaur’ at this time.³⁰

Lovecraft’s attendance at the Slater Avenue School (formerly located at the northeast corner of Slater Avenue and University Avenue, where St Dunstan’s Prep School now stands) changed all this, at least to some degree. He entered the for the first time in 1898, at the ‘highest grade of primary school’³¹ (presumably the fourth or fifth grade), but apparently withdrew at the end of the term in 1899.