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

When, at the age of 11, I was a member of the Blackstone Military Band, (whose youthful members were all virtuosi on what was called the ‘zobo’—a brass horn with a membrane at one end, which would transform humming to a delightfully brassy impressiveness!) my almost unique ability to keep time was rewarded by my promotion to the post of drummer. That was a difficult thing, insomuch as I was also a star zobo soloist; but the obstacle was surmounted by the discovery of a small papier-mache zobo at the toy store, which I could grip with my teeth without using my hands. Thus my hands were free for drumming—whilst one foot worked a mechanical triangle-beater and the other worked the cymbals—or rather, a wire (adapted from a second triangle-beater) which crashed down on a single horizontal cymbal and made exactly the right cacophony … Had jazz-bands been known at that remote aera, I would certainly have qualified as an ideal general-utility-man— capable of working rattles, cow-bells, and everything that two hands, two feet, and one mouth could handle.¹¹ I don’t think I can add much to this. The zobo appears to have been a sort of combined harmonica and kazoo.

All this may seem to give the impression that Lovecraft, in spite of his precociousness, his early health problems, his solitude as a very young boy, and his unsettled nervous condition, was evolving into an entirely ‘normal’ youth with vigorous teenage interests (except sports and girls, in which he never took any interest). He also seems to have been the leader of his ‘gang’ of boys. But how normal, really, was he? The later testimony of Stuart Coleman is striking: ‘from the age of 8 to 18, I saw quite a bit of him as we went to schools together and I was many times at his home. I won’t say I knew him “well” as I doubt if any of his contemporaries at that time did. He was definitely not a normal child and his companions were few.’¹²

Clara Hess, the same age as Lovecraft, supplies a telling and poignant memory of Lovecraft’s devotion to astronomy around this time:

Howard used to go out into the fields in back of my home to study the stars. One early fall evening several of the children in the vicinity assembled to watch him from a distance. Feeling sorry for his loneliness I went up to him and asked him about his telescope and was permitted to look through it. But his language was so technical that I could not understand it and I returned to my group and left him to his lonely study of the heavens.¹³

This is certainly touching, but one should not conclude that Lovecraft’s ‘loneliness’ was inveterate or even that he necessarily found in it anything to regret: intellectual interests were always dominant in his temperament, and he was entirely willing to sacrifice conventional gregariousness for its sake.

But Lovecraft’s days of innocence came to an abrupt end. Whipple Phillips’ Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company had suffered another serious setback when a drainage ditch was washed out by floods in the spring of 1904; Whipple, now an old man of seventy, cracked under the strain, suffering a stroke and dying on 28 March 1904. This blow was bad enough, but there was still worse to come: because of the mismanagement of Whipple’s estate after his death, relatively little was left of his property and funds; so Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of 454 Angell Street and occupy a smaller house at 598 Angell Street.

This was probably the most traumatic event Lovecraft experienced prior to the death of his mother in 1921. By 1904 he and his mother were living alone with his widowed grandfather, as both of his aunts and his uncle had married. With Whipple gone, it would have been both financially and practically absurd to have maintained the huge house at Angell and Elmgrove just for the two of them, and the residence at 598 Angell Street was no doubt chosen because of its propinquity. It was, however, a duplex (the address is 598–600 Angell Street), and Lovecraft and his mother occupied only the western side of the smallish house. One would imagine that these quarters—which Lovecraft describes as five rooms and an attic¹⁴—would, in literal terms, still be adequate for a boy and his mother; but psychologically the loss of his birthplace, to one so endowed with a sense of place, was shattering. To compound the tragedy, Lovecraft’s beloved cat, Nigger-Man, disappeared sometime in 1904. This was the only pet Lovecraft ever owned in his life, in spite of his almost idolatrous adoration of the felidae. Nigger-Man’s loss perhaps symbolised the loss of his birthplace as no other event could.

To see exactly what an impact the death of his grandfather, the loss of the family fortune (whatever of it was left by this time— Whipple had left an estate valued only at $25,000, of which $5000 went to Susie and $2500 to Lovecraft¹⁵), and the move from his birthplace had on the thirteen-year-old boy, we must read a remarkable letter of 1934: