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

What was his mother doing in this entire situation? It is a little hard to say. Recall her own medical record at Butler Hospital (now destroyed) as quoted by Winfield Townley Scott: ‘a woman of narrow interests who received, with a traumatic psychosis, an awareness of approaching bankruptcy’.¹⁵ This assessment was made in 1919, but the condition must have been developing for years, at the very least since the death of Susie’s own father, Whipple Phillips. Although she had high praise for her son (‘a poet of the highest order’), Scott rightly conjectures: ‘However she adored him, there may have been a subconscious criticism of Howard, so brilliant but so economically useless.’ No doubt her disappointment with her son’s inability to finish high school, go to college, and support himself did not help this situation any.

Lovecraft, in speaking of the steady economic decline of the family, notes ‘several sharp jogs downward, as when an uncle lost a lot of dough for my mother and me in 1911’.¹⁶ Faig is almost certainly correct in identifying this uncle as Susie’s brother Edwin E. Phillips.¹⁷ Edwin had difficulty even maintaining his own economic position, as his chequered employment record indicates. We do not, of course, know how Edwin lost money for Susie and Howard, but one suspects that it had something to do with bad investments, which not only failed to yield interest but also dissolved the capital.

The effect of all this on Susie, and on her view of her son, can only be conjectured. Consider the following disturbing anecdote related by Clara Hess, which I believe dates to around this time if not a little earlier:

when she [Susie] moved into the little downstairs flat in the house on Angell Street around the corner from Butler Avenue I met her often on the Butler Avenue cars, and one day after many urgent invitations I went in to call upon her. She was considered then to be getting rather odd. My call was pleasant enough but the house had a strange and shutup air and the atmosphere seemed weird and Mrs. Lovecraft talked continuously of her unfortunate son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze at him.

When I protested that she was exaggerating and that he should not feel that way, she looked at me with a rather pitiful look as though I did not understand about it. I remember that I was glad to get out in the fresh air and sunshine and that I did not repeat my visit.¹⁸

This is one of the most notorious pieces of evidence regarding Lovecraft and his mother, and I see no reason why we should not accept it. The reference to ‘hideous’ is presumably to his physical appearance, and this is why I want to date the anecdote to Lovecraft’s late teens or early twenties: as a younger boy he is so normal-looking that no one—even a mother who was getting a little ‘odd’—could have deemed him hideous; but by the age of eighteen or twenty he had perhaps reached his full height of five feet eleven inches, and had probably developed that long, prognathous jaw which he himself in later years considered a physical defect. Harold W. Munro notes that as early as his high school years Lovecraft was bothered by ingrown facial hairs; but when Munro speaks of ‘mean red cuts’ on Lovecraft’s face he evidently believes these to have been the product of a dull razor. In fact, as Lovecraft attests, these cuts came from his using a needle and tweezers to pull out the ingrown hairs.¹⁹ This recurring ailment—which did not subside until Lovecraft was well into his thirties—may also have negatively affected his perception of his appearance. As late as February 1921, only a few months before his mother’s death, Lovecraft writes to his mother of a new suit that ‘made me appear as nearly respectable as my face permits’.²⁰