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

And yet, Lovecraft clearly retained his interest in chemistry and, even if he had given up chemical writing, continued conducting experiments in chemistry and obtaining new instruments. Among the latter were a spectroscope (which Lovecraft still owned in 1918) and a spinthariscope for the detection of radioactivity. He relates one ‘physical memorial’ of his chemical interests: ‘the third finger of my right hand—whose palm side is permanently scarred by a mighty phosphorus burn sustained in 1907. At the time, the loss of the finger seemed likely, but the skill of my uncle [F. C. Clark]—a physician—saved it.’²²

As for The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, the later issues (beginning on 16 April 1905) are not appreciably different from their predecessors. Lovecraft is now experimenting with using various colours in the magazine, the only result of which is that some of the issues are extremely difficult to read; by the issue of 14 May 1905 Lovecraft declares that no more colour will be used.

These issues provide some indication of who exactly was reading the magazine. The members of his own family had surely done so at the outset; now that only his mother remained in the house with him, perhaps Lovecraft now concentrated on selling copies (still priced at 1cent per copy, 25 cents for six months, and 50 cents for a year) to his friends and to relatives living in the vicinity. A startling ‘Notice!!’ in the issue of 8 October 1905 states: ‘Subscribers residing outside of Providence will receive their papers in a bunch once a month by mail.’ This notice would not have been necessary unless there were at least a handful of such subscribers. Perhaps one can suspect Lovecraft’s aunt Annie, now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband; and there may have been other relatives.

Still more startling is a notice in the issue of 22 October 1905: ‘Since we have started, others are constantly copying, there is a new paper just out that is a direct copy. PAY NO ATTENTION to these but to the GENUINE.’ Lovecraft’s schoolmates at Hope Street were evidently offering him the sincerest form of flattery, but Lovecraft did not appreciate it.

Lovecraft, then, was making a game effort to resume his normal life and writing after his grandfather’s death and the move to 598 Angell Street. And perhaps his friends lent their assistance. The Providence Detective Agency was revived in 1905 or thereabouts, as well as the Blackstone Orchestra. The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy for 16 April 1905 prints an ad listing H. P. Lovecraft and C. P. Munroe as the leaders (‘Fine music cheap’). The ads continue to appear as late as October 1906. In January 1906 we learn of its ‘New Repertoire—Tenor & Baritone Solos’ as well as ‘Phonograph Concerts’. Can it be that Lovecraft was actually attempting to sing? It certainly seems that way; consider a letter of 1918:

Something over a decade ago I conceived the idea of displacing Sig. Caruso as the world’s greatest lyric vocalist, and accordingly inflicted some weird and wondrous ululations upon a perfectly innocent Edison blank. My mother actually liked the results—mothers are not always unbiased critics— but I saw to it that an accident soon removed the incriminating evidence. Later I tried something less ambitious; a simple, touching, plaintive, ballad sort of thing a la John McCormack. This was a better success, but reminded me so much of the wail of a dying fox-terrier that I very carelessly happened to drop it soon after it was made.²³

Since Lovecraft in a 1933 letter rattles off many of the hit songs of 1906, we can assume that these were the songs he both performed in public and recorded on the phonograph.

This period was also the heyday of the Great Meadow Country Clubhouse. Lovecraft and his pals would ride on bicycles along the Taunton Pike (now State Road 44) to the rural village of Rehoboth, about eight miles from Providence just across the state line into Massachusetts. Here they found a small wooden hut with stone chimney and built an addition to it—’larger than the hut itself’²⁴— where they could conduct whatever games they fancied. The hut and chimney had been built by an old Civil War veteran named James Kay, who probably also assisted them in building the addition. When Lovecraft and Harold Munroe returned to this site in 1921, they found very little changed: ‘Tables stood about as of yore, pictures we knew still adorned the walls with unbroken glass. Not an inch of tar paper was ripped off, & in the cement hearth we found still embedded the small pebbles we stamped in when it was new & wet—pebbles arranged to form the initials G. M. C. C.’²⁵ I saw those pebbles myself about twenty years ago, although on a more recent trip I found them almost entirely scattered. Now, of course, only the stone chimney remains, and even that is disintegrating. In its day it must have been an impressive sight.