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CHAPTER THREE

There can be no doubt whatsoever that HPL was quite different in many important ways from his grammar school classmates of seventy years ago. While every man of great imaginative brilliance has displayed enough unusual qualities in childhood to have drawn attention to himself at one time or another, Howard was a bit more than just a highly imaginative and sensitive child; he was a youthful prodigy who could compose rhymed verse at the age of six.

If he astonished his teachers by being able to converse with them quietly like a small adult, he must have astonished his classmates even more. As a rule, only a miracle can spare this type of child from the bullying tendencies which are the worst aspect of what happens when children of a dozen different family backgrounds and genetic endowments are thrown together in one school. But in HPL’s case the miracle took place.

He often discussed his school days with me, and if any deep mental wounds with their residual scars had been inflicted upon him, the concealment of such wounds solely to spare himself painful memories would have been totally inconsistent with the candor which was as natural to him as breathing when he dwelt upon the past. The psychological trauma which Freud ascribes to buried childhood memories would have met a stumbling block straight off, if HPL had for a moment allowed himself to take psychoanalysis seriously. I doubt whether he had any buried memories at all that did not go back to his actual infancy, for from that period onward, every tormenting confrontation with reality he may have experienced would have remained for him indelibly inscribed as on the pages of an open book, readily accessible to total memory recall. And no psycho-therapeutic prodding would have been required to induce such a recollection.

There were two aspects of his character which were, I am convinced, as pronounced in him when he was very young as when I first met him. He possessed the sort of innate personal dignity and belief in himself that would have made a great many schoolboy bullies draw back, not always for ignoble reasons. Even the worst of bullies have a tendency, despite themselves, to respect this kind of high integrity. Howard also possessed indomitable personal courage. Any classroom bully who encroached to a serious extent on his right to prideful independence (and I can picture him as being compassionately tolerant of very minor infringements) would almost certainly have found himself confronting a detached, cool-tempered fighting machine that would have stretched him out on the floor in short order. Even if that particular bully had been ten pounds heavier with a longer reach, I am certain Howard would have prevailed with comparative ease.

Despite the “invalidism” which his mother’s over-solicitude to some extent succeeded in inflicting upon him, HPL possessed a certain measure of physical strength. It was so much in evidence in his later years that it could hardly have been absent in a child who never set about building his muscles in a systematic way to compensate for a “frailness” which I doubt he ever took as seriously as some of his early correspondents probably believed.

Actually, there was nothing frail about him, even though he did not enjoy robust health at any time in his life. He was, of course, totally unlike the roaring, Falstaffian sort of literary hero with a bone-crushing handclasp which Hemingway preferred to regard as super-masculine. But very few sensitive, creative artists of any real achievement appear to have been that type, and the list includes Poe and Joyce and Yeats and even what little we know concerning the personal attributes of Shakespeare himself. (All of the portraits of the Bard of Avon, whether authentic or not, suggest that the poet was no more Hemingwayesque in aspect than Shelley or Keats or Santayana.)

During his formative years, HPL engaged in many of the hobbies and enthusiasms commonly associated with boyhood. At one time he was a member of an alert group of youngsters who had built up an impressive sleuthing apparatus modeled upon the Burns Detective Agency, which at the turn of the century was the only investigative bureau that had acquired so nationwide a reputation that every twelve year old in America was familiar with its slogan: “We always get our man.” Or so Howard assured me, at least, since the agency was formed soon after the Civil War and thus preceded my birth by a few years! In any case, I was far too young to have been aware of what was taking place in that realm even as late as 1910, when Howard had long since abandoned his interest in becoming an early equivalent of Hammett’s “Thin Man.” At a somewhat earlier age when he was seven or eight, he joined some neighboring youngsters in forming a firefighting brigade which moved up and down the streets of the Ancient Hill with hook-and-ladder equipment of miniature size which they had managed to put together from wooden crates and garden hoses.

Very much on record in previous Arkham House books and elsewhere, is HPL’s involvement with astronomy in his teenage years, leading to a column under his byline in the Providence Evening Tribune which one Providence elder refused to believe he could have authored, even when he produced a volume of cuttings (he always called them “cuttings,” never “clippings”) to prove it.

I do not know whether Howard ever engaged in that most universal of boyhood hobbies, stamp collecting, and my failure ever to ask him surprises me a little, because I was the most ardent of stamp collectors between the ages of nine and twelve. I do know that he collected coins, for in his New York period his knowledge of Roman numismatics was as extensive as his familiarity with ancient bronze and baked-clay Roman lamps, and he once helped me pick out magnificent examples of both “coinage and lampage” at an old-coin shop on Fulton Street. (I still possess a Roman silver coin as large as a fifty-cent piece, uneven about the edges, which I purchased on that occasion for the incredible sum of two dollars, but perhaps it is of some base alloy that merely looks like silver. I have never bitten into it to make sure.)

At the age of thirty, HPL’s views in many areas would have stunned anyone unfamiliar with the New England character at its most puritanical. The image he had of himself was that of a man of stern moral principles, ultraconservative in outlook, and opposed to any kind of bohemianism. Yet this was precisely the opposite of a hypocritical self-image; holding such views seemed to him both natural and necessary, and entirely in accord with the code of a gentleman.

It seemingly cost him no apparent effort or misgivings to be that kind of a person. He not only would have failed to derive the slightest emotional satisfaction from going contrary to such a code, but would have felt he had betrayed the highest instincts of his being. Howard believed there was nothing in that code which could keep a man from being both poet and dreamer, or from admiring the best that has been said and thought in the world. In the realm of aesthetics, the great poets meant as much to him as they did to me, and although out of fealty to his beloved eighteenth century he preferred Pope and Dryden to Keats and Shelley, he would instantly have conceded that the major romantic poets, from Coleridge to Swinburne, were of considerably greater stature.

Before concluding the somewhat statistical aspects of this record and passing on to personal memories, there is a matter of great importance which the reader must constantly keep in mind, or otherwise the way HPL refers to himself in many of the conversations which follow will seem bewildering and difficult to understand. I am uncertain precisely when Howard became convinced that he was “the old gentleman from Providence-Plantations,” but I strongly suspect the feeling that he was at least two and a half times his calendar age first began to take shape in his mind before he was twenty-five. I only know that when he arrived in New York it had become so settled a conviction that he referred to me and to his other young correspondent, Alfred Galpin, as his “grandsons”; to James F. Morton, who was just as much of an inner-circle correspondent and was almost twice his age, as “my son”; and to one of his aunts, Mrs. Gamwell, as “my daughter.”

He sometimes spoke of me as “Sonny”—a designation which I found provoking, but since he more often addressed me as “Belknapius,” (My middle name was used by my family to distinguish me from my father since I was a “Jr.”) I did not wish to offend him by protesting too vigorously whenever he engaged in that silly-sounding lapse, which he seemed unable totally to avoid. I did protest once or twice, but it did no good. He went right on calling me “Sonny” in an occasional letter and more often in his communications to others until I began to feel, at thirty or so, that the absurdity of it exceeded all bounds. No one had ever called me “Sonny” before—even at the age of fifteen—because all apart from its juvenile implications, the name suggests a buoyant, cheerful, jack-in-the-box disposition which I emphatically never possessed. But it was impossible to stay angry with HPL for long, and since I am certain he would have dropped the appellation instantly and forever had I been sufficiently insistent in my protests, I have only myself to blame for what would have become even more of an absurdity if at my present age of a hundred and ten, he could have continued to address me—if only on rare occasions—as the “Sonny” of that long vanished segment of Space and Time.