THE DEATH OF H.P. LOVECRAFT
The early years of the twentieth century – the
heyday of the pulp magazine era – saw the rise of some of the greatest horror
and fantasy writers of all time. Men like Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood,
Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, Hugh B. Cave, Robert Bloch and many others
unleashed a torrent of words on their terrified readers. But of all of the
great writers of the era, few could compete with an eccentric young recluse
named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who died in relative obscurity at age 46 on
March 15, 1937.
Today, Lovecraft’s name is known around the world
and has become synonymous with a genre of horror that involves brooding old New
England houses, creeping monsters and unspeakable horrors that lurk just beyond
what he called “the thin wall of darkness separating reality from the unplumbed
gulfs of madness.” His dark tales have appeared in hundreds of books and
anthologies and have been made into dozens of films.
H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft wrote some 60 stories and short novels that
revolutionized weird tales, many of which were part of what is called the
“Cthulhu Mythos,” a term coined by Lovecraft’s friend August Derleth. The
stories are a blend of horror and science fiction which has been continued by
many modern authors. The premise of the Mythos involved demon gods that came to
Earth millions of years ago to dominate the oceans, valleys and remote regions
of the planet. In time, these creatures were driven from the Earth by a race of
kindly disposed Old Ones. Although imprisoned on far-flung worlds (or in the
case of the winged, tentacled Cthulhu, at the bottom of the ocean), the evil
influence of the ancient outsiders lingers in certain repellent myths of
antiquity, and in backwater places where they are worshipped in horrific rites.
It is the struggle between the demon “outsiders” and the vulnerable human
beings that moves the Mythos stories along, often to horrifying conclusions. A
continuing theme is the constant threat of Cthulhu’s return.
Lovecraft’s stories worked because he knew how to
keep the most horrific elements off-stage, allowing the reader’s imagination to
fill in the rest. He buttressed his works with references to invented sources –
spurious quotations from ancient texts and references to fictional anthropological
and archaeological studies, many of them undertaken by professors from the
equally fictional Miskatonic University. He intrigued and baffled his readers
by mingling fact with fiction and citing passages from “forbidden” grimoires
like the Necronomican, written by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred. The
Necronomican didn’t exist, but that didn’t stop Lovecraft fans from searching
for it in libraries and bookstores. Today, at least four versions of the
Necronomican have been created.
In spite of his lurid tales about demon gods,
monsters, cannibalism and rotting corpses in remote farmhouse cellars,
Lovecraft was a shy, frail and sensitive man, so squeamish that he often
fainted at the sight of blood. He was an eccentric who didn’t fit in with
twentieth-century life, frequently expressing the regret that he hadn’t been
born two hundred years earlier. Most readers of Weird Tales, where many of his
stories appeared, would have been shocked to know that such an odd, reserved
fellow had written such tales of bracing horror.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20,
1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother, Sarah Susan Phillips, was
descended from proud English stock and his father, Winfield Scott Lovecraft,
was a traveling salesman for the silverware manufacturer Gorham & Co. When
Lovecraft was three years old, his father suffered a nervous breakdown in a
hotel in Chicago and was brought back to Butler Hospital in Providence, where
he remained for five years before dying in 1898. His father’s death left Lovecraft
to be raised by a trio of doting women -- his mother and two aunts. The boy
withdrew into a dream world in which the peaceful hills and forests of New
England transformed into a weird landscape where strange creatures moved in the
eerie mists and the rush of gigantic wings floated down from the night skies.
Lovecraft was a highly gifted child, reciting
poetry at age two and reading at age three. He made his first attempt at
writing weird fiction, a story called “The Noble Evesdropper,” when he was six
or seven. His earliest enthusiasm was for the Arabian Nights stories, which he
read by the time he was five. It was at this time that he adopted the pseudonym
of “Abdul Alhazred,” later to become the author of the mythical Necronomican.
The next year, however, his Arabian interests were eclipsed by the discovery of
Greek mythology, gleaned through Bulfinch’s Age of Fable and through children’s
versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. Around this same time, Lovecraft discovered
the works of Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood. Lovecraft considered
Blackwood’s story “The Willows,” about another dimension impinging on our own,
to be the best “weird tale” of all time.
Lovecraft was as eccentric as he was precocious.
His hatred of foreigners – especially the “verminous hordes of distorted
aliens” that flocked to New York – knew no bounds, as did his distaste for all
things modern and mechanical. Even though he was married once, he avoided women
(except for his relatives) and all things sexual.
As a boy, Lovecraft suffered from frequent
illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. He only sporadically attended
school and never received a high school diploma, but this didn’t stop him from
soaking up information. At about the age of eight he discovered science, first
chemistry, and then astronomy. He began to produce science journals that he
distributed amongst his friends. In 1906, his first writing appeared in print
as letters to the editor and columns in local newspapers.
In 1904, Lovecraft’s grandfather died and the
subsequent mismanagement of his affairs caused terrible financial problems for
the family. Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of their lavish
Victorian home into a cramped apartment. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss
of the house in which he had been born and some say that he contemplated suicide.
In 1908, just before he was to have graduated from high school, he suffered a
nervous breakdown, which caused him to leave school without a diploma. This
fact, along with his consequent failure to start at Brown University, were
sources of great shame for Lovecraft in later years. From 1908 to 1913
Lovecraft was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his astronomical
interests and writing poetry.
It was writing that forced Lovecraft to begin
interacting with the outside world again. Having taken to reading the early
“pulp” magazines of the day, he became so incensed at the insipid love stories
written by author Fred Jackson in The
Argosy that he wrote a letter, in verse, attacking Jackson. This letter was
published in 1913, and evoked a storm of protest from Jackson’s defenders.
Lovecraft engaged in a heated debate in the letter column of The Argosy and its associated magazines,
Lovecraft’s responses being almost always in the form of rollicking poems. The
controversy was noted by Edward F. Daas, president of the United Amateur Press
Association (UAPA), a group of amateur writers from around the country who
wrote and published their own magazines. Daas invited Lovecraft to join the
UAPA, and Lovecraft did so in early 1914. He began publishing his own paper, as
well as contributing a large body of poems and essays to other journals. Later,
Lovecraft became president and official editor of the UAPA, and also served
briefly as president of the rival National Amateur Press Association (NAPA).
Lovecraft always believed that this experience was what saved him from a life
of unproductive solitude.
Having found his niche in the world of amateur
magazines, Lovecraft began writing fiction again, something he had abandoned in
1908. W. Paul Cook and other writers noted the promise in some of Lovecraft’s
early tales and urged him to take up the pen again. Lovecraft did, writing “The
Tomb” and “Dagon” in quick succession in the summer of 1917. He continued to
write fiction, although poetry and essays continued to occupy most of his time.
During this time, Lovecraft developed his greatest friendships. His friends
were scholars, poets and writers – men with whom he stayed in constant contact
through letters, some of which were more than 50 pages long. He eventually became
one of the most prolific correspondents of the twentieth century, writing some
87,500 letters. Typically, he had a habit of dating his letters 200 years
earlier than the actual date.
It’s through his letters that we know most of what
we do about this complex and enigmatic man who, even though he never published
a single book during his lifetime and died a pauper, became one of America’s
most celebrated horror writers. Today, Lovecraft and his mythical creations
turn up in such diverse places as episodes of South Park and songs by
Metallica. He even has a Facebook page. Like his hero Edgar Allan Poe, whom he
called “my god of fiction,” Lovecraft did not live long enough to savor his
fame. It is because of the friendships that he developed through his letter
writing, especially that of August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, co-founders of
Arkham House, the publishing company that introduced Lovecraft to the masses,
that his work has survived.
Lovecraft’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown in
1919 and was admitted to Butler Hospital. Her death on May 24, 1921, resulted
from a bungled gall bladder operation. Lovecraft was shattered by the loss of
his mother, but in a few weeks had recovered enough to attend an amateur
journalism convention in Boston on July 4, 1921.
It was at this convention that he first met the
woman who would become his wife. Sonia Haft Greene was a Russian-born Jewish
widow who was seven years older than Lovecraft. In spite of the age difference
and Lovecraft’s usual dislike of foreigners, the two seemed happy together, at
least at first. Lovecraft visited Sonia in her Brooklyn apartment in 1922, and
the news of their marriage in St. Paul’s Chapel in Manhattan on March 3, 1924,
was not entirely a surprise to their friends. However, Lovecraft’s aunts,
Lillian D. Clark and Annie E. Phillips Gamwell, were notified of the ceremony
by letter after it was over. Lovecraft moved into Sonia’s apartment in
Brooklyn, and initial prospects for the couple seemed good. Lovecraft was
starting to see a small amount of success from the acceptance of several of his
stories by Weird Tales, the celebrated pulp magazine that was founded in 1923,
and Sonia was the owner of a successful hat shop on Fifth Avenue.
But trouble soon found the couple -- the hat shop
went bankrupt, Lovecraft turned down the chance to edit a companion magazine to
Weird Tales that would have forced
him to move to Chicago, and Sonia’s health collapsed, forcing her to spend time
in a New Jersey sanitarium. Lovecraft tried to find work, but there was little
work available for a 34-year-old man with no job experience. On January 1,
1925, Sonia moved to Cleveland to take a job there and Lovecraft moved into
Brooklyn’s seedy Red Hook neighborhood.
Although Lovecraft did have friends in New York, he
became increasingly depressed by his isolation and the “foreigners” that
surrounded him in the city. His fiction turned from the nostalgic (“The Shunned
House,” which is set in Providence) to the bleak (“The Horror at Red Hook” and
“He,” which lay bare his feelings about New York. Finally, in 1926, he made
plans to return to Providence, which he missed badly. He had no idea how Sonia
fit into his plans. Although he continued to profess his affection for her, he
went along with his aunts when they barred her from coming to Providence to
start a business. They refused to allow their nephew to be tainted by the
stigma of a wife who was a tradeswoman. The marriage was essentially over and
they divorced in 1929.
When Lovecraft returned to Providence in 1926, he
did not hide away from the world as he had done before. In fact, the last 10
years of his life were his best years, both as a writer and as a human being.
His life was relatively uneventful. He traveled widely to various antiquarian
sites around the eastern seaboard. He wrote his greatest fiction, from “The
Call of Cthulhu” (1926) to “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931) to “The Shadow
out of Time” (1934–35) and he continued his vast correspondence. He had not
only found his niche as a New England writer of weird fiction but as a man of
letters. He nurtured the careers of many young writers, became concerned with
political and economic issues, and he continued absorbing knowledge on a wide
array of subjects, from philosophy to literature to history to architecture.
The last two years of Lovecraft’s life were filled
with hardship. In 1936 his beloved aunt, Lillian Clark, died, and he moved into
a house with his other aunt, Annie Gamwell, soon after. His later stories,
increasingly lengthy and complex, became difficult to sell, and he was forced
to support himself largely through the “revision” or ghost-writing of stories,
poetry, and nonfictions works. In 1936, the suicide of Robert E. Howard, one of
his closest correspondents, left him confused and saddened. By this time, the
intestinal cancer that would cause Lovecraft’s death had already progressed too
far for treatment.
He grew weaker and by February 1937, emaciated and
in great pain, Lovecraft was confined to bed. He continued to write, propped up
on pillows, but his cancer was so painful that he had to be fed intravenously
and frequently sedated with morphine. He carried on for as long as he could but
was finally compelled to enter Jane Brown Memorial Hospital on March 10, 1937,
where he died five days later – pen and notebook in hand.
He was buried on March 18 at the Phillips family
plot at Providence’s Swan Point Cemetery, a graveyard filled with ancient trees
and crumbling tombstones that once likely served as inspiration for his fevered
tales.
