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

‘The Alchemist’ (1908) is still more of an advance in style and technique. This tale recounts an ancient aristocratic family in France that appears to be afflicted with a curse whereby the eldest son in each generation dies before the age of thirty-two; but the true cause of the curse is the machinations of Charles Le Sorcier, a magician who has extended his life preternaturally in order to kill each eldest son.

This tale, much more than its predecessor, betrays the influence of Poe in the narrator’s obsessive interest in his own psychological state; indeed, many details in the story make us think of Lovecraft’s remark that he himself ‘felt a kinship to Poe’s gloomy heroes with their broken fortunes’.³⁴ Antoine, the narrator, is of a lofty and ancient line; but ‘poverty but little above the level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour’. As a result, Antoine—an only child—spends his years alone, ‘poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood’; he is kept away from the ‘peasant children’ who dwell nearby. All this can be seen as a deliberately distorted, but still recognizable, reflection of Lovecraft’s own childhood and upbringing. The last page of the autograph manuscript of ‘The Beast in the Cave’ bears the following notation:

Tales of Terror

I. The Beast in the Cave

By H. P. Lovecraft

(Period–Modern)

It is interesting to note that Lovecraft was already at this time thinking of assembling a collection of his tales; we do not know what other tales, if any, were to make up the volume. The autograph manuscript of ‘The Alchemist’ does not survive, so we do not know whether it formed part of this volume; probably it did.

We have only hints of what further tales Lovecraft wrote in the next three years, for he declares that in 1908 he destroyed all but two of the stories he had been writing over the last five years.³⁵ Late in life Lovecraft discovered a composition book bearing the title of one lost story dating to 1905: ‘Gone—But Whither?’ He remarks wryly: ‘I’ll bet it was a hell-raiser! The title expresses the fate of the tale itself.’³⁶ Then there was something called ‘The Picture’ (1907), which in his Commonplace Book he describes as concerning a ‘painting of ultimate horror’. Elsewhere he says of it:

I had a man in a Paris garret paint a mysterious canvas embodying the quintessential essence of all horror. He is found clawed & mangled one morning before his easel. The picture is destroyed, as in a titanic struggle—but in one corner of the frame a bit of canvas remains … & on it the coroner finds to his horror the painted counterpart of the sort of claw which evidently killed the artist.³⁷

There was also a story about a Roman settlement in America, although Lovecraft states that he never completed it.³⁸

By 1908, the time of the fourth ‘near-breakdown’ of his young life, Lovecraft had decided that he was not a fiction-writer, and resolved instead to devote himself to science and belles-lettres. At that time, in spite of the promise shown by ‘The Beast in the Cave’ and ‘The Alchemist’, his decision would not have been entirely unwarranted. Lovecraft had by this time already amassed an impressive record of publications on science, and it would have been reasonable for him to have assumed that he would continue to pursue such a course and become a professional writer in this field.

Lovecraft first broke into true print with a letter (dated 27 May 1906) printed in the Providence Sunday Journal for 3 June; it concerns a point of astronomy. On 16 July 1906 Lovecraft wrote a letter to the Scientific American on the subject of finding planets in the solar system beyond Neptune. Much to his delight, it was published in the issue of 25 August 1906. Around this time, Lovecraft simultaneously began to write two astronomy columns for local papers, the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner and the Providence Tribune (morning, evening, and Sunday editions). The Gleaner articles begin on 27 July 1906, and after a hiatus of a month progress weekly until the end of the year. The Tribune articles commence on 1 August 1906 and proceed monthly until 1 June 1908.