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

My first memories are of the summer of 1892—just before my second birthday. We were then vacationing in Dudley, Mass., & I recall the house with its frightful attic water-tank & my rocking-horses at the head of the stairs. I recall also the plank walks laid to facilitate walking in rainy weather—& a wooded ravine, & a boy with a small rifle who let me pull the trigger while my mother held me.²

Dudley is in the west-central portion of Massachusetts. In Auburndale the Lovecrafts stayed at least briefly with the poet Louise Imogen Guiney and her mother. Letters from Guiney to F. H. Day, dating to May, June, and July 1892, have been thought to allude to the Lovecrafts; however, recent research by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, reveals that the persons in question were some German visitors. Lovecraft himself states that ‘we stayed [at the Guineys’] during the winter of 1892–93’,³ and in the absence of contrary evidence we are compelled to accept this testimony.

Lovecraft says that Guiney (1861–1920) ‘had been educated in Providence, where she met my mother years before’.⁴ There is some little mystery around this. Guiney was indeed educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart at 736 Smith Street in the Elmhurst section of Providence, attending the school from the year it opened in 1872 until 1879; but Susie, as we have seen, attended the Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, for at least the period 1871–72. Although Guiney scholar Henry G. Fairbanks asserts that the Sacred Heart accepted Protestants as well as Catholics,⁵ I think it is unlikely that Susie was actually sent there. Nevertheless, one must assume that Susie and Guiney somehow became acquainted during this time. It is possible that Lovecraft exaggerated the degree of his mother’s acquaintance with Guiney; or perhaps his mother herself did so to her son. She may have stressed the Guiney connection once she saw Lovecraft developing into a writer himself. Lovecraft’s memories of Auburndale—especially of the Guiney residence—are numerous and clear:

I distinctly recall the quiet, shady suburb as I saw it in 1892 … Miss Guiney kept a most extraordinary collection of St. Bernard dogs, all named after authors and poets. A shaggy gentleman by the classic name of Brontë was my particular favourite & companion, being ever in attendance on my chariot as my mother wheeled that vehicle through the streets & avenues. Brontë would permit me to place my fist in his mouth without biting me, & would snarl protectingly if any stranger approached me.⁶

Another memory Lovecraft had was the tableau of a railway bridge in the city:

I can see myself as a child of 2¹/₂ on the railway bridge at Auburndale, Mass., looking across and downward at the business part of the town, and feeling the imminence of some wonder which I could neither describe nor fully conceive—and there has never been a subsequent hour of my life when kindred sensations have been absent.⁷ His first literary stirrings can be dated to this period:

At the age of two I was a rapid talker, familiar with the alphabet from my blocks & picture-books, & … absolutely metre-mad! I could not read, but would repeat any poem of simple sort with unfaltering cadence. Mother Goose was my principal classic, & Miss Guiney would continually make me repeat parts of it; not that my rendition was necessarily notable, but because my age lent uniqueness to the performance.⁸

Guiney herself seems to have taken to the infant; she would repeatedly ask, ‘Whom do you love?’ to which Lovecraft would pipe back: ‘Louise Imogen Guiney!’⁹

Lovecraft had a brief encounter with a distinguished friend of Guiney’s, Oliver Wendell Holmes—one of many fleeting brushes with established writers he would have throughout his life: ‘Oliver Wendell Holmes came not infrequently to this [Guiney’s] menage, and on one occasion (unremembered by the passenger) is said to have ridden the future Weird Tales disciple on his venerable knee.’¹⁰ Holmes (1809–94) was at this time very old, and was indeed a close friend of Guiney; no doubt he failed to remember for very long his meeting with the future master of weird fiction.

Lovecraft’s early residences and travels were, of course, dictated by his father’s business. The latter’s medical record lists him as a ‘Commercial Traveller’, and Lovecraft frequently affirms that his father’s commercial interests kept him and his family in the Boston area during the period 1890–93. There is little reason to doubt Lovecraft when he says that ‘my image of him is but vague’:¹¹ Winfield lived with his family for only the first two and a half years of Lovecraft’s life, and perhaps less than that if his business trips took him very far afield for long periods of time.

The illness that struck Winfield Scott Lovecraft in April 1893 and forced him to remain in Butler Hospital in Providence until his death in July 1898 is worth examining in detail. The Butler Hospital medical record reads as follows: