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

I am of course not trying to defend this remark by Lovecraft’s mother—surely no mother ought ever to say such a thing about her son, no matter how ugly he in fact is—and it may also be that her comment has a somewhat broader implication. It has often been conjectured that she was transferring to her son the hatred and disgust she felt for her husband after he was stricken with syphilis, and I think this is very likely. Susie, of course, is not likely to have known the exact nature or causes of her husband’s ailment—the doctors themselves did not do so—but she may have sensed that something relating to sex had afflicted him; and, now that her own son was developing into an adult male with burgeoning sexual instincts, she may have feared that he might turn out very much like her husband—especially if Lovecraft had at this time taken to wearing his father’s clothing. In any case, I do not think we have any grounds to deny that she made the ‘hideous’ remark; Lovecraft himself once (and only once) admitted to his wife that his mother’s attitude to him was (and this is his word) ‘devastating’,²¹ and we need look no further for the reasons for that than this single comment.

Both Clara Hess and Harold W. Munro give evidence that Lovecraft did indeed avoid human contact in his post-high-school period. Hess writes: ‘Sometimes I would see Howard when walking up Angell Street, but he would not speak and would stare ahead with his coat collar turned up and chin down.’²² Munro states: ‘Very much an introvert, he darted about like a sleuth, hunched over, always with books or papers clutched under his arm, peering straight ahead recognizing nobody.’²³

We have the merest scraps of information as to what Lovecraft was actually doing during this entire period. One highly suggestive datum is his admission that he visited Moosup Valley, and specifically the Stephen Place house in Foster (birthplace of his mother and grandmother), in 1908. This visit can scarcely have been purely recreational. His mother accompanied him, as there is a photograph of her (probably taken by Lovecraft himself) standing in front of the house.²⁴ Once again it seems as if Lovecraft required some sort of renewal of ancestral ties to help him out of a difficult psychological trauma; but in this case the visit seems to have accomplished little.

The record for 1909 (aside from his astronomical observations and the correspondence courses) is entirely blank. For 1910 we know that he saw Halley’s Comet, but probably not at Ladd Observatory. In 1918 he stated:

I no more visit the Ladd Observatory or various other attractions of Brown University. Once I expected to utilise them as a regularly entered student, and some day perhaps control some of them as a faculty member. But having known them with this ‘inside’ attitude, I am today unwilling to visit them as a casual outsider and non-university barbarian and alien.²⁵

This sense of alienation presumably began soon after his collapse in 1908, and he probably saw Halley’s with his own telescope. He mentions that he missed seeing a bright comet earlier that year ‘by being flat in bed with a hellish case of measles!’²⁶ Elsewhere he states that he lost 54 pounds during this bout with the measles and nearly died.²⁷ The year 1910 was, however, the period of his most frequent attendance of stage plays, and he reports seeing many Shakespeare productions at the Providence Opera House that year. He also visited Cambridge, Massachusetts—probably to see his aunt Annie Gamwell and his twelve-year-old cousin Phillips. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday—20 August 1911—by riding the electric trolley cars all day, going through the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts before coming home.

Did Lovecraft continue to associate with his boyhood friends? The evidence is a little ambiguous. No doubt he felt a certain sense of failure and defeat as he saw his high school friends marry, find jobs, and in general take on the responsibilities of adult life. But consider this remarkable testimony from Addison P. Munroe, whom Winfield Townley Scott interviewed:

He lived but a few houses distant from our own home and was quite frequently over here with our sons. I remember that we had a room fixed up in our basement for the boys to use as a club room, which was a popular place with Howard. The club, so called, consisted of about a half-dozen of the neighborhood boys, around twenty years of age, and when they had a so-called ‘banquet,’ improvised and usually selfcooked, Howard was always the speaker of the evening and my boys always said he delivered addresses that were gems.²⁸