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CHAPTER TWO

Much of the statistical material in the preceding chapter might have been somewhat abbreviated if all readers of this volume possessed the specialized knowledge of Lovecraftian lore that has become more widespread today than is commonly supposed, making him almost unique in that respect among literary figures of the past half-century. But, as I have previously stressed, a few readers might possibly have purchased this volume out of sheer fascination with his very name (which the author of the surrealistic article just quoted describes as “slightly incredible, but not a nom de plume”), while a larger number would feel grievously and quite justifiably resentful if I failed to include such basic biographical details as the date of his birth, his parentage, the dates of his arrival in New York and return to Providence, and a generalized summary of the stories as well. All this material will be elaborated upon later, as my personal memories unfold, but at least some attention must be given to it here, before I embark upon that kind of voyage.

Lovecraft was born at 454 Angell Street, the home of his maternal grandfather, on August 20, 1890. It was a stately house and he often referred to it in his letters as the old Phillips mansion on the Ancient Hill. The early years of his childhood were spent for the most part in the Phillips residence, although he and his parents sometimes stayed a few weeks with close friends, and he mentioned one visit to Fall River which seems to have occurred before he was five.

His parents—Sarah Phillips Lovecraft and Winfield Scott Lovecraft—had no other children. His father was a traveling salesman of English ancestry, and the family saw him seldom. It has been said that he never renounced his British citizenship, but I doubt if there is any way by which this could be verified. Winfield Lovecraft died when his son was very small, and thus HPL’s formative years were influenced far more by his grandfather, for whom he always had the highest admiration and respect.

Although Lovecraft’s mother was not a vain or self-centered woman and was held in high esteem by her friends, she had a tendency to be over-protective, and there can be no question that she made her son feel like an invalid from an early age. Actually he was not an invalid at all, although at a certain period in his boyhood or early adolescence, he appears to have suffered from ill-health which necessitated his removal from school. But any evidence that he differed greatly from the most robust of youngsters is far from conclusive, apart from the fact that “robust” would have been meaningless in relation to HPL, for he was of the wiry, resilient type, with no outward appearance of possessing exceptionally good health.

Though it may be a departure from anything in Freud, I have often thought that an over-solicitous parent, for whom a child has the kind of respect which goes with the way HPL felt about family traditions, is in a position to exercise more influence on a child’s view of himself than an ordinary parent under ordinary circumstances. So sensitive was Lovecraft to such traditions almost from birth, that I doubt whether the parental dominance factor entered into the matter at all.

HPL’s mother died during the first year of my correspondence with him, when his adolescent years were quite far in the past. Not until we met in person did he discuss his childhood years with me, and extensive as our talks became, he never depicted himself as having been the “sickly,” nervously high-strung child or youth that more than one recent biographical sketch has seemingly taken for granted. He did confess to having been a kind of “semi-invalid” during one period of his boyhood and occasionally would use that term in relation to all the years which had preceded his arrival in New York. But as soon as I met him, I think he knew that I would dismiss the extension of that term to include his present self as an absurdity, and much as that whimsical pretension may have pleased a particular side of his nature (which I shall discuss later at some length), he quickly abandoned it.

After the death of his mother, her place at the 598 Angell Street residence to which they had moved was taken by his two aunts, Lillian P. Clark and Annie E. Phillips Gamwell. Mrs. Clark was several years older than her sister and perhaps a bit more matronly in aspect, although that quality is difficult to associate with a woman who was extremely quick in her movements and quite fragile physically. Mrs. Gamwell was much more social-minded, and perhaps was more outgoing in general, although both women possessed in common the quality of great kindliness. They were perhaps just a trifle over-protective (if one must use that term), but this was chiefly toward providing their nephew with every possible comfort and freedom from strain which they had the wisdom to realize is necessary to any writer if he is to do his best creative work without becoming sidetracked or tormented by distractions. I am quite certain they never actually “coddled” him or were as neurotically over-solicitous as his mother had been, or indeed that they did anything whatsoever to make him feel a “semi-invalid.”

His decision to marry in March 1924 was incredibly impulsive, totally unexpected by his friends and correspondents, and it occurred after the briefest of courtships. He always insisted that he had been persuaded to leave Providence by the prospect of a new, but reasonably settled, kind of existence in New York City which would enable him to continue with his writing and make new contacts in a rewarding, leisurely manner. And despite all that has been said to the contrary, there was just enough adventurousness, even somewhat reckless daring, in HPL’s nature to have made such a prospect far from lacking in appeal.

Although New York at first enchanted him, his sojourn (which lasted only until April 1926) quickly turned into a nightmare. He could not abide the crowds, the high-pressure activity, the feeling that he was adrift and cut off from virtually everything he most treasured. The actual deterioration of his marriage took place a little more slowly than his disillusionment with the city itself, for the person who now had become Mrs. Sonia Lovecraft, a divorcee of thirty-nine with a grown daughter, was a woman of great understanding and very much in love with him. But Sonia totally failed to comprehend that nothing which happened to HPL in New York could possibly transform him into a young, alert, and eminently successful wage-earner of the 1920s.

What Lovecraft missed most was his removal from all aspects of the past that were intimately associated with the city of his birth—not only with his ancestral heritage, but with every cherished memory that went back to his earliest childhood. No longer could he take long, solitary walks through the streets which he felt could be found only on the Ancient Hill; no longer could he watch the play of sunlight and shadow on ancient steeples and sequestered churchyards where “dead leaves whisper of departed days, longing for sights and sounds that are no more,” or pause occasionally to pat a stray cat before returning home. (He was inordinately fond of cats, but paradoxically enough, did not regard them as in any way allied to the Black Arts, regardless of their color. There was also an abundance of stray cats in New York, of course, but few other compensations for all that he had lost by breaking so abruptly with the past.)

In one of HPL’s best-known short stories, which appears to verge slightly upon the autobiographical, the central character is depicted not only as an outsider but as something of a monster. It apparently gave Lovecraft a kind of whimsically ironic pleasure to picture himself in this manner because his love for the past was so deep-seated and ineradicable that it embraced both the vistas of light and grace and loveliness, and the dark crypts below the earth which cannot be explored with artistic fidelity unless one assumes the identity of a tomb-dweller.

But at least in one respect HPL was an outsider—his kindliness and his ability to relate to others without the faintest trace of self-seeking were extraordinary. I have encountered not a few men and women who would have been incapable of any ego-bolstering meanness, but in Howard it seemed to go just a little beyond even that. It is hard to explain or analyze, but it was a difference which could be sensed by everyone who knew him.

A short while after his return to Providence his marriage was terminated by a quietly arranged divorce. No two people could have parted more amicably, and though the stated cause was “desertion,” there can be no doubt that the excuse was a mutually agreed upon one to outwit the outrageously barbaric statutes pertaining to divorce in almost every state at that time.

During this period HPL now resided with Mrs. Clark at 10 Barnes Street and then in 1933 moved to his final home, a Georgian dwelling at 66 College Street. He returned to New York a half-dozen times, and ceased to be quite the hermit as he had been before his marriage. He journeyed to New Orleans and Charleston and other cities where nocturnal excursions into the past could be pursued in so variegated a way that his escape from Time’s tyranny might be constantly reinforced by beckoning ghosts from earlier centuries. Weed-choked patio gardens hidden from view by rusting iron grill-work particularly fascinated him, as did unbroken rows of old houses with blankly-staring windows dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Although Lovecraft was later to be haunted by a poverty even more extreme than he had endured toward the end of his New York years, he still possessed a dwindling inheritance which he managed to supplement by ghost-writing for eight or ten revision clients and through the occasional sale of a story. (During at least five years, story sales added considerably to his always small income, despite the low rate of payment which prevailed at the time.) This enabled him to avoid stripping his traveling expenses to a wholly fleshless kind of bone, an unpleasantness which can mar every planned excursion to some extent, even when it does not appreciably shorten it.

In outward appearance HPL remained unchanged even when he seemed to be journeying back through time, until the colonial period dimmed and vanished, and was replaced by a crowded Roman marketplace or a stone column close to the Forum. Poe’s most striking feature, a forehead so high and broad it verged on the idiosyncratic, was not possessed by Lovecraft, who rather had a brow of moderate expanse. (I never asked him, but he was too well-versed in physiognomy on a sound scientific level to believe that such an incredible expanse of forehead had anything to do with Poe’s intellectual endowments or his poetic genius, since it has been established beyond dispute that quite low brows are to be found in many men of genius and quite high ones are not at all unlikely in idiots.)

Below his brow, a nose (with perhaps just enough curvature to justify describing it as aquiline and a little on the bony side) and a rather elongated lower jaw gave him somewhat the aspect of a medieval scholar who has spent long hours poring over illuminated manuscripts, his features lengthening a little year by year until that prolonged concentration has caused him to blink more often than the unscholarly are ever likely to do, all apart from the eyestrain factor. It was an expressive, kindly face, the opposite of handsome, but animated by alert and perceptive eyes that occasionally could assume a look of piercing intensity.

During his periodic trips to New York he would sometimes bring his newest story with him and read it aloud while seated in a comfortable chair. Once in bleak midwinter before a crackling log fire, I was the first to hear The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, and three or four other stories of novelette length, with their dramatization on the screen, radio, and television many years in the future.

Although he lacked an accomplished actor’s stage presence, HPL was an extremely gifted mimic, and the change which came over him on these occasions was astounding. His voice deepened and became more resonant; as he entered his inner world of cosmic strangeness and alien dimensions, he became the protagonist of the story without ceasing to be H. P. Lovecraft. Despite its increased resonance, his voice never lost its conversational tone and never once verged on the oratorical (and that, in a way, made the entire recital more convincing). By combining the tone of a cultivated New Englander with the rustic accents of a fictional character of dark and terrifying antecedents, he created, particularly in The Whisperer in Darkness, a kind of paradoxical double image which made those readings unforgettable. He did not, of course, combine the two impressions in an overlapping way at any point in the story, but the overall impression still remained as I have described.

If HPL had written only stories of supernatural horror dealing with malign, tomb-dwelling presences of destructiveness and dread, his writing would nevertheless have challenged comparison with the best of Bierce, Blackwood, A. E. Coppard, M. R. James, Saki, and Walter de la Mare, to mention just six masters of the macabre among perhaps ten writers of comparable stature after Poe who excelled in that particular realm. But the cycle of stories which has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos not only sets Lovecraft apart from all other writers in the genre; it is simply without parallel in the whole of literature.

Recently described as “the myth that has captured a generation,” the Mythos presents an entire pantheon of Elder Gods and of eon-banished entities which come terrifyingly to life through their unfolding genealogy. Long before the birth of the solar system, these “Old Ones” were cast into outer darkness by forces less powerful than themselves through a cataclysm of undreamed of violence, and someday they will awaken from slumber to reclaim the whole of their lost heritage, which includes the entire universe of stars. Already they have begun to stir and creep back into human consciousness in night-shadowed dreams of madness and death. Cthulhu, a creature of nightmare dimensions whom Lovecraft wisely chose not to describe beyond hinting that he was vaguely fishlike and terrible beyond belief, is the dominant entity in this cosmic assemblage. His frightfulness becomes wholly believable because HPL has succeeded in maintaining, in every story in the Mythos, the total “suspension of disbelief” that is the hallmark of truly imaginative myth-making.

There are few passages in the Mythos which afford the reader respite from the eerie forebodings that mount gradually to an awesome climax; nothing here in the least resembles that illusory calm in the midst of a hurricane which permits momentary self-deception. Instead, icy winds of horror blow inexorably with steadily increasing violence until all is engulfed in an amorphously swirling kind of vastness that topples cities and whips the sea into gigantic waves with an ominous warning impossible to ignore:

Cthulhu still lives…again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more…but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places…Who knows the end? What has risen may sink and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

Although my own stories followed a somewhat different pattern in their approach to the macabre and were less cosmic even when exploring the mysteriously multidimensional aspects of Time and Space or the legend-haunted avenues of forgotten civilizations, it is not too surprising that one of these early tales, The Hounds of Tindalos, became incorporated into the Mythos. I have always felt it was an undeserved honor, but our long friendship made it more or less inevitable, particularly since the elaboration of his Mythos by others appealed irresistibly to the whimsical, boyish side of HPL’s nature.

Robert Bloch, who was also an early correspondent, contributed several chilling entities, and so did Clark Ashton Smith and two other Weird Tales writers. In The Shambler from the Stars, written perhaps a year before its publication in Weird Tales in 1935, Bloch not only makes HPL the central character (very much as I did in The Space Eaters) but links the Old Ones to several wholly fiendish entities of his own creation to which HPL himself subsequently responded with a sequel!

Smith’s Tsathoggua came closest to Cthulhu in frightfulness, but was otherwise quite different—a monstrous demon god not unlike those Indonesian effigies that adorn village huts, magnified a thousand times, and possessing far more inscrutable, universe-altering endowments. But he could ride comfortably, if hideously, on the cosmic winds generated by Cthulhu, and in all probability bowed to him as the Master.

My contributions to the Mythos were of assorted shapes and sizes, ranging from the tiny, flesh-devouring Doels, who inhabited an alien dimension shrouded in night and chaos, to the monstrous Chaugnar Faugn, whom only the suicidally inclined would have mistaken for a pachyderm. I also contributed one scenic vista, the mysterious, perpetually mist-shrouded Plateau of Leng, and one forbidden book, John Dee’s English translation of The Necronomicon, which I placed at the head of The Space Eaters when that story first appeared in Weird Tales, but later omitted when the story was reprinted in The Magazine of Horror, fearing that my invention might take on an appalling life of its own and appear on the shelves of some unsuspecting and defenseless book dealer! (It has been rumored that the original Arabic text once thus materialized and only a mound of ashes was found between the book racks the following morning…)

HPL also incorporated into the Mythos more than one allusion to entities that Robert W. Chambers had depicted (with far less consideration for book dealers) in The King in Yellow, a theoretically non-existent volume having much in common with The Necronomicon. Virtually all myth cycles, fictional or otherwise, include these “fringe-level” borrowings, which but to a minor extent enter into the main body of the cycle. The contributions of other writers did not diminish the genius-inspired originality of the Cthulhu Mythos; in its major aspects it remains entirely Lovecraftian. But Lovecraft could take mythical names or references, sometimes tossed off without too much thought, and cloak them with an aura of awesome mystery. Conscious artifice of this nature had, I have always felt, no important bearing on the visions which Lovecraft could conjure up when he became wholly absorbed in his writing. Then his tremendous creativity took over, and mere artifice was swept aside by a total surrender to “dreams no mortal had ever dared to dream before.” At such moments cities hoary with age, crumbling into ruin on the planet of some distant star, echoed to his footsteps, and it was easy to picture him bending to examine some instrument of nonhuman science, dating back ten billion years.