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

Jackson really was a very attractive woman, and the fact that she was fourteen years older than Lovecraft need not preclude a romance between the two. But one other fact must now be adduced: although by this time divorced, Jackson (according to Wetzel and Everts) was carrying on an affair with the noted black poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962), and she would remain involved with him for many years. Did Lovecraft know this? I find it impossible to believe, given his extraordinarily strict views on the need to maintain an absolute ‘colour line’ prohibiting any sort of sexual union between blacks and whites; if he had known, he would have dropped Jackson immediately even as a colleague. He might not even have known that Horace Jordan was black. Lovecraft of course did know of Braithwaite, who by this time was already the most prominent black critic in the country; he would correspond with him briefly in 1930. As literary editor of the influential Boston Transcript and as editor of the annual Anthology of Magazine Verse (1913–29), Braithwaite occupied a formidable position in American poetry at this time.

There is one further bit of evidence that seems to clinch the matter of a romance between Lovecraft and Jackson. Lovecraft’s wife Sonia Davis told R. Alain Everts in 1967 that ‘I stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson’.⁷ How this happened will be the subject of a later chapter; but this romance, if it could really be called that, appears to have been very languidly pursued on both sides. There is no evidence that Jackson ever came to Providence to visit Lovecraft, as Sonia frequently did even though she lived much farther away (Brooklyn), and after Sonia ‘stole’ him we hear little of Winifred either from Lovecraft or in the amateur press generally.

Meanwhile Lovecraft was not done travelling. Two more trips to Boston were made in the early months of 1921, both again for amateur conventions. On 22 February the Boston Conference of Amateur Journalists was held at Quincy House. In the afternoon session Lovecraft delivered a paper, written the previous day, on a prescribed subject, ‘What Amateurdom and I Have Done for Each Other’. Later Lovecraft engaged in various discussion—mostly with W. Paul Cook and George Julian Houtain—but declined an invitation to sing, even though he had apparently done so at the September 1920 gathering. So Lovecraft’s days as a plaintive tenor were not wholly over!

A month later Lovecraft returned to Boston for a St Patrick’s Day gathering of amateurs on 10 March. This took place at 20 Webster Street. Members were seated in a circle in the parlour, and literary contributions were recited in sequence. Lovecraft on this occasion read the story ‘The Moon-Bog’, written expressly for the occasion; it received abundant applause, but did not win the prize.

Lovecraft was planning yet another trip in early June, this time to New Hampshire to visit Myrta Alice Little in Hampstead, near Westville (just over the Massachusetts border, a few miles north of Haverhill). But Lovecraft’s one surviving letter to Little, written on 17 May 1921, in which he outlined the plans for the trip, was written only a week before the most traumatic event of his entire life up to this point: the death of his mother on 24 May. In ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ Lovecraft suggests that the immediate postwar period led to the solidification of his philosophical thought:

The Peace Conference, Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Butler (the modern), H. L. Mencken, and other influences have perfected my cynicism; a quality which grows more intense as the advent of middle life removes the blind prejudice whereby youth clings to the vapid ‘all’s right with the world’ hallucination from sheer force of desire to have it so. These ‘influences’ are certainly a heterogeneous lot, and they seem primarily influential in Lovecraft’s ethical, political, and social philosophy. What he does not state here are what appear to be the two central influences on his metaphysical thought of the time— Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1899; English translation 1900) and Hugh Elliot’s Modern Science and Materialism (1919).

When Lovecraft stated his philosophy as ‘mechanistic materialism’, he was intent on denying certain key tenets of idealistic or religious philosophy; specifically, that any event can occur in the universe beyond the bounds of natural law (although all natural laws may not currently be known, or may never be known); that any ‘immaterial’ substance (such as the ‘soul’) can exist; and that the universe as a whole is progressing toward any particular goal. The denial of God, the soul, and an afterlife is implicit in all these formulations.