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

The Evening News articles become tedious and repetitious if read all at once, for they are in large part merely accounts of the notable celestial phenomena for the month: the phases of the moon, the constellations visible in the morning or evening sky, any eclipses, meteor showers, or other events of note, and the like. After a year, of course, many of the same phenomena will recur. Nevertheless, Lovecraft gradually loosens up a little and introduces other sidelights along the way. In particular, he becomes keen on explaining the origin of the Greek or Roman names for the constellations, and this naturally allows him to recount, sometimes at considerable length, the myths behind such names as Castor and Pollux, Argo Navis (recall his lost juvenile work, The Argonauts), and many others. His early reading of Bulfinch and other mythographers held in him good stead here.

In the fall of 1914, however, as Lovecraft was steadily writing article after article for the News, a rude interruption occurred. An article entitled ‘Astrology and the European War’ by one J. F. Hartmann appeared in the issue for 4 September 1914—only three days after Lovecraft’s column for that month, and in the exact place in the newspaper (the centre of the last page) occupied by his column. Joachim Friedrich Hartmann (1848–1930) was, one imagines, of German ancestry, but was born in Pennsylvania. He came to Providence no later than 1912.³ Hartmann’s article begins resoundingly with an attack on the ‘vulgar prejudice against the noble science of astrology by otherwise learned men’ and goes on to transcribe certain predictions for the rest of the year. Given the state of international relations in Europe in 1914, the predictions are not especially remarkable: ‘The influences operating in King George’s horoscope are very unfavourable’; ‘The kaiser is under very adverse directions, and danger both to health and person is indicated’; and so on.

This was just the sort of thing to make Lovecraft see red. He began with a straightforward but somewhat intemperate response entitled ‘Science versus Charlatanry’, published in the issue for 9 September. But Lovecraft had underestimated his foe. Hartmann responded with a direct rebuttal to Lovecraft’s letter in the issue for 7 October, addressing Lovecraft’s points sytematically and actually scoring a few telling blows. Three days later, on 10 October, a letter by Lovecraft appeared under the title ‘The Falsity of Astrology’. This letter is still more intemperate than the first. While asserting that Hartmann had said little new in his response, Lovecraft’s own letter does little to flesh out his argument.

But before Hartmann could respond to this latest attack, Lovecraft struck back in a different manner, adapting Jonathan Swift’s attacks on the astrologer Partridge, written under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaffe. The result is a series of articles, as by ‘Isaac Bickerstaffe, Jun.’, mercilessly poking fun at Hartmann and astrology in general. Lovecraft does not follow Swift in exact particulars—Swift’s tour de force had been to predict the death of Partridge, and then to follow it up with a very convincing account of Partridge’s death, after which the poor devil had a very difficult time proving that he was still alive—but merely maintains that, by its own principles, astrology ought to be able to predict events far in the future rather than merely a year or so in advance. Accordingly, one of Lovecraft’s articles concludes with a prediction of the earth’s destruction on 26 February 4954. In spite of several game rebuttals by Hartmann (in which it becomes pitifully obvious that he has no idea that Bickerstaffe is Lovecraft), the satires did the trick and shut him up.

From May to February 1915 Lovecraft published a series of fourteen rather routine articles entitled ‘Mysteries of the Heavens Revealed by Astronomy’ in the Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News, although part of the thirteenth and the fourteenth article have not come to light. This series claims to be a systematic and elementary treatise on all phases of astronomy for the complete novice. As such, ‘Mysteries of the Heavens’ is a good example of what Lovecraft might have done had he decided to become merely a popular science writer. Mildly interesting as the series is, it is good for the sake of literature that he did not so limit his horizons. The assignment was presumably arranged for Lovecraft by Chester Munroe, who had established himself in Asheville.

If Lovecraft’s views on prose style were conservative and oldfashioned, in poetry they were still more so, both in precept and in practice. We have seen that his poetry of the early teens bears a self-consciously antiquated cast, and is in some ways more archaistic than even some of his juvenile verse, which (as in the ‘Attempted Journey’) at least features some contemporaneousness in subject.