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

I don’t know that we need read a great deal into all these mocklove poems about Galpin: certainly Lovecraft’s beloved Georgians had made a specialty of it, and The Rape of the Lock is only the bestknown example. But by consistently deflating the emotion of love in these and other poems, Lovecraft may be shielding himself from falling under its influence. The probability that he would so fall was, at the moment, comparatively small, but he was not taking any chances. During his involvement with the Providence Amateur Press Club in 1914–16 a few of the members decided to play a rather malicious joke on him by having one of the female members call him up and ask him to take her out on a date. Lovecraft stated soberly, ‘I’ll have to ask my mother’, and of course nothing came of the matter.¹⁶ In a letter to Galpin Lovecraft notes in passing that ‘so far as I know, no feminine freak ever took the trouble to note or recognise my colossal and transcendent intellect’.¹⁷ Whether this was exactly true or not is something I shall take up later.

Although amateur journalism was still the focal point of Lovecraft’s world, he was slowly—probably from his mother’s urging—making tentative forays at professional employment. His scorn of commercial writing prevented him from submitting his work to paying magazines, and the small number of his poems that were reprinted in the National Magazine all saw prior publication in amateur journals, and moreover were presumably not sent in by Lovecraft but were selected by the editors of the magazine itself from an examination of amateur papers. But if Lovecraft was not at the moment inclined to make money by writing, in what way could he earn an income? Whipple Phillips’s inheritance, some of it already squandered by bad investments, was slowly but inexorably diminishing; even Lovecraft probably saw that he could not indulge himself as a gentleman-author forever.

The first sign we have that Lovecraft was actually attempting to earn an income occurs in a letter to John T. Dunn in October 1916. In explaining why he is unable to participate as thoroughly in amateur affairs as he would like, Lovecraft states: ‘Many of my present duties are outside the association, in connexion with the Symphony Literary Service, which is now handling a goodly amount of verse.’¹⁸ This was a revisory or ghostwriting service featuring Lovecraft, Anne Tillery Renshaw (who edited the amateur journal The Symphony), and Mrs J. G. Smith, a colleague of Renshaw’s (although not in the UAPA), both of whom lived at this time in Coffeeville, Mississippi. It does not appear that this service, as such, was in business for very long.

This is the first indication that Lovecraft had commenced what would become his only true remunerative occupation: revising and ghostwriting. He never managed to turn this occupation into anything like a regular source of income, as he generally took on jobs only from colleagues and very sporadically placed advertisements for his services. In many senses it was exactly the wrong job for him in terms of his creative work: first, it was too similar in nature to his fiction-writing, so that it frequently left him too physically and mentally drained to attempt work of his own; and second, the very low rates he charged, and the unusual amount of effort he would put into some jobs, netted him far less money than a comparable amount of work in some other profession would have done.

What of Lovecraft and his family at this time? We have seen that aunt Lillian, upon the death of her husband Franklin Chase Clark in 1915, lived in various rented quarters in the city. W. Paul Cook’s account of his visit in 1917 makes it clear that she spent considerable time with her sister and nephew. Aunt Annie, upon her separation from Edward F. Gamwell (whenever that might have been) and the death of her son Phillips at the end of 1916, returned from Cambridge and probably lived with her brother Edwin in Providence. The death of Edwin E. Phillips on 14 November 1918 passes entirely unnoticed in the surviving correspondence by Lovecraft that I have seen. Letters from this period are admittedly few, but the silence is none the less significant.

Meanwhile Lovecraft himself, as he had been doing since 1904, continued to live alone with his mother at 598 Angell Street. The nature of their relations for much of the period 1904–19 is a mystery. All in all, they could not have been very wholesome. Lovecraft was still doing almost no travelling outside the city, and the lack of a regular office job must have kept him at home nearly all day, week after week. And yet, Clara Hess, their neighbour of twenty-five years, remarks disturbingly: ‘In looking back, I cannot ever remember to have seen Mrs. Lovecraft and her son together. I never heard one speak to the other. It probably just happened that way, but it does seem rather strange.’¹⁹