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

Then, in May 1917, came Lovecraft’s attempt at enlistment in the R.I.N.G. and, later, in the regular army. We have seen how Susie put a stop to the first of these efforts by pulling strings. Lovecraft’s comment that ‘If I had realised to the full how much she would suffer through my enlistment, I should have been less eager to attempt it’²⁰ reveals a staggering failure of communication and empathy between mother and son. Susie must have been aware of Lovecraft’s militarism and his eagerness to see the United States enter the war on England’s side; but she must genuinely have been caught off guard at this attempt at enlistment—which, let us recall, came before President Wilson’s announcement of the resumption of the draft.

Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, is surely correct in noting that ‘Susie’s sharp decline … seems to have begun at about the time of her brother’s death’²¹ in November 1918. Edwin was the closest surviving male member of Susie’s generation. From now on, Susie, Lillian, and Annie were all wholly reliant on Whipple Phillips’s and (in the case of Lillian) Franklin C. Clark’s estates for their income. (Since Annie never formally divorced her husband, Edward F. Gamwell, it is not clear whether she received any financial support from him; I think it unlikely.) Lovecraft was the only viable wage-earner in the family, and he was clearly not doing much to support himself, let alone his mother and aunts.

The result, for Susie, was perhaps inevitable. In the winter of 1918–19 she finally cracked under the strain of financial worries. On 18 January 1919 Lovecraft writes to Kleiner: ‘My mother, feeling no better here, has gone on a visit to my elder aunt for purposes of complete rest; leaving my younger aunt as autocrat of this dwelling.’²² On 13 March, Susie, ‘showing no signs of recovery’,²³ was admitted to Butler Hospital, where her husband had died more than twenty years before and where she herself would remain until her death two years later.

Lovecraft notes in his January letter to Kleiner that ‘such infirmity & absence on her part is so unprecedented’, but one wonders whether this was really the case. Once again Clara Hess provides some very disturbing testimony:

I remember that Mrs. Lovecraft spoke to me about weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark, and that she shivered and looked about apprehensively as she told her story.

The last time I saw Mrs. Lovecraft we were both going ‘down street’ on the Butler Avenue car. She was excited and apparently did not know where she was. She attracted the attention of everyone. I was greatly embarrassed, as I was the object of all her attention.²⁴

I believe that these incidents occurred just before Susie’s breakdown. Again, if Lovecraft was oblivious of Susie’s gradual decline, he must have had very little close or meaningful contact with his mother. And yet, Lovecraft himself was profoundly shaken by Susie’s nervous collapse. In the January letter to Kleiner he writes:

you above all others can imagine the effect of maternal illness & absence. I cannot eat, nor can I stay up long at a time. Penwriting or typewriting nearly drives me insane. My nervous system seems to find its vent in feverish & incessant scribbling with a pencil … She writes optimistic letters each day, & I try to make my replies equally optimistic; though I do not find it possible to ‘cheer up’, eat, & go out, as she encourages me to do.

It is obvious that Lovecraft felt very close to his mother, however much he may have failed to understand her or she to understand him. I have no warrant for saying that his response to her illness is pathological; rather, I see it as part of a pattern whereby any serious alteration in his familial environment leads to extreme nervous disturbance. The death of his grandmother in 1896 led to dreams of ‘night-gaunts’; the death of his father in 1898 brought on some sort of ‘near-breakdown’; the death of Whipple Phillips and the loss of his birthplace in 1904 caused Lovecraft seriously to consider suicide. Even less tragic events resulted in severe traumas: school attendance in 1898–99 and violin lessons produced another ‘nearbreakdown’; yet another breakdown caused or was caused by his inability to complete high school, and led to a several-year period of vegetation and hermitry.