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

In the summer of 1916 Moe suggested to Lovecraft that a rotating correspondence cycle be formed amongst UAPA members. Lovecraft, already a voluminous correspondent, readily assented to the plan and suggested Kleiner as a third member. Moe suggested a fourth—Ira A. Cole, an amateur in Bazine, Kansas, and editor of the Plainsman. The correspondence cycle started up, under the name (invented by Moe) Kleicomolo, derived from the first syllables of the last names of each member. Each member would write a letter addressed to the other three. The idea at the outset was to rescue letter-writing as an art form from oblivion; whether or not the group succeeded, it certainly gave an impetus to Lovecraft’s own letter-writing and to the development of his philosophical thought.

In the meantime changes of some significance were occurring in Lovecraft’s family life. He had been living alone with his mother at 598 Angell Street since 1904: with his grandfather Whipple Phillips dead, his younger aunt Annie married and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his elder aunt Lillian married and living in Providence but some distance away, the atmosphere of 598 might well have been becoming somewhat claustrophobic. I have already noted Clara Hess describing the ‘strange and shutup air’ of the house at about this time.

Then, on 26 April 1915, after thirteen years of marriage to Lillian, Lovecraft’s uncle Franklin Chase Clark died at the age of sixty-seven. It is difficult to know how close Lovecraft was to Clark beyond his teenage years. We can certainly not gauge Lovecraft’s emotions about Dr Clark from his ‘Elegy on Franklin Chase Clark, M.D.’, which appeared in the Providence Evening News three days after his death, for a more wooden, lifeless, and mechanical poem would be difficult to find.

About a year and a half later, on the very last day of 1916, Lovecraft’s cousin Phillips Gamwell died of tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. Phillips, the only one of Annie E. Phillips Gamwell’s and Edward F. Gamwell’s children to survive beyond infancy, was the only male member of Lovecraft’s family of his own generation. Lovecraft’s various references to him make it clear that he was very fond of Phillips, even though he could have seen him only when he visited Cambridge or when Phillips came down to Providence. Lovecraft observes that about this time Phillips, then twelve years old, had ‘blossomed out as a piquant letter-writer eager to discuss the various literary and scientific topics broached during our occasional personal coversations’,²⁵ and Lovecraft attributes his fondness for letter-writing to four or five years’ correspondence with Phillips.

Annie had taken her son to Roswell, Colorado, in October 1916 for his health, but his tuberculosis had obviously advanced too far and he died there on 31 December 1916. Lovecraft’s ‘Elegy on Phillips Gamwell, Esq.’, published in the Providence Evening News for 5 January 1917, is as uninspired as his tribute to Dr Clark. After Phillips’s death, Annie returned to Providence, apparently living with her brother Edwin until his death on 14 November 1918 (and it is remarkable that Lovecraft says nothing about his death in any letters of the period or later), then probably in various rented quarters until early 1919, when she moved in with Lovecraft at 598 Angell Street.

Lovecraft, so far as I can tell, was not actually doing much during this period aside from writing; but he had discovered one entertaining form of relaxation—moviegoing. Lovecraft’s enthusiasm for the drama had waned by around 1910, the very time that film was emerging as a popular, if not an aesthetically distinguished, form of entertainment. By 1910 there were already five thousand nickleodeons throughout the country, even if these were regarded largely as entertainment for the working classes. Lovecraft reports that the first cinema shows in Providence were in March 1906; and, even though he ‘knew too much of literature & drama not to recognise the utter & unrelieved hokum of the moving picture’, he attended them anyway—’in the same spirit that I had read Nick Carter, Old King Brady, & Frank Reade in nickel-novel form’.²⁶ One develops the idea that watching films may have occupied some, perhaps much, of the ‘blank’ years of 1908–13, as a letter of 1915 suggests: ‘As you surmise, I am a devotee of the motion picture, since I can attend shows at any time, whereas my ill health seldom permits me to make definite engagements or purchase real theatre tickets in advance. Some modern films are really worth seeing, though when I first knew moving pictures their only value was to destroy time.’²⁷