A
Brief Biography of H. P. Lovecraft
by
W. E. Johns
I.
Youth
On
June 12, 1889, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Tremont Street
in Boston, Winfield Scott Lovecraft, and Sarah Susan Phillips
were married. Right on time 9½ months later, in the morning
on August 20, 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born, at 194
Angell Street, Providence, the home of his grandparents Phillips.
Winfield
was a traveling salesman, or "commercial traveler" as the term
then was, working for Gorham & Company, silversmiths of Providence,
RI. He was well educated, always immaculately dressed, and spoke
with a cultivated British accent - despite being born in Rochester,
New York. Many researchers have labeled him as "pompous". How
he met Sarah is unknown, but the fact that they were married in
Boston, with church staff as witnesses, may indicate that the
marriage was against the wishes of Sarah's parents, perhaps on
account of their social status and, despite appearances, Winfield's
lack thereof.
In
early 1893, Winfield suffered a mental breakdown while on a business
trip to Chicago, accusing hotel staff of insulting him and raping
his wife (who was still in Providence), and had to be returned
to Providence under restraint. He was admitted to Butler hospital
on April 25, where he continued to deteriorate. The diagnosis
of the hospital was one of "paresis", known today as tertiary
neurosyphillis, the final stage of untreated syphilis. At the
time of his admission to Butler Hospital, the connection between
syphilis and paresis was only suspected (it wasn't proved until
1911) but it is quite probable that Sarah knew the sexual nature
of the disease. Her subsequent strange attitude toward her son
may well have been the result. Perhaps the earliest manifestation
of this odd attitude was Sarah's refusal to dress Howard as a
boy. While it was common in that era to dress infant and toddler
boys in dresses, Sarah continued this practice far longer than
was common; it was only when Howard was six and protested his
girlish locks to his mother that she allowed them to be cut -
she wept as they were shorn, and made a point of saving them.
Into
the gap left in Howard's life by the incarceration of his father
stepped his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833-1904).
Whipple was a prominant businessman in Providence, starting his
career running a general store in 1855, and by 1880 he had established
the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company, which dammed the Snake
River in Southwest Idaho, providing irrigation to the surrounding
farms and orchards. In 1890, however, the dam washed out and had
to be replaced at emourmous expense; by 1900 the company was bankrupt.
Whipple bought out most of his partners and gave it another try.
The
origins of Lovecraft's taste for the weird and fanstastical are
in this period. In January 1896, his grandmother Robie Alzada
Place Phillips died, an event which, according to Lovecraft in
a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner dated November 16, 1916, "threw
the household into a gloom from which it never fully recovered".
The atmosphere was so grim that Lovecraft began suffering from
nightmares of such intensity that he would, for the rest of his
life, "experience a thrill of fear... & instinctively struggle
to keep awake" whenever he felt himself falling asleep. Of all
the nightmares he had for the remainder of his life, "even the
worst is pallid beside the real 1896 product." It was, in fact,
from these nightmares that he derived the "night-gaunts" that
he later used in The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath.
About
this same time Lovecraft came across the 1876 edition of Colridge's
Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,
illustrated by Gustave Doré. Already familiar with Doré's
work from his illustrations of Dante's Inferno and Milton's
Paradise Lost, Lovecraft was profoundly effected.
Lovecraft
himself dated the beginning of his literary career to 1896; the
very first work of his that survives is "The Poem of Ulysses;
or, The Odyssey: Written for Young People", an 88 line abstract
of Pope's 14,000 line translation of Homer's Odyssey. Stylistically,
Lovecraft's work owes more to Rime of the Ancient Mariner
than to Pope's translation.
The
Hellenic nature of his writings at this time reflect his fascination
with the ancient world of Rome and Greece; he had discovered the
ancient world in the pages of Nawthorne's The Wonder Book
and Tanglewood Tales, with their Teutonized versions of
ancient fables, and Bulfinch's The Age of Fable. He also
read the
1717 edition of Garth's Ovid, an assemblage of translations
of the Metamorphoses by various poets and authors, edited
by Sir Samuel Garth. (Lovecraft's later fondness for the iambic
pentameter also came from this work.) His love of the ancient
world became so strong that he would build altars to Jove in the
woods and even believe that he had seen satyrs and dryads.
In a letter to R. Michael dated July 20, 1929, he would write
"Mythology
was my life-blood then, and I really almost believed
in the Greek and Roman deities - fancying I could glimpse fauns
and satyrs and dryads at twilight in those oaken groves where
I am sitting now. When I was about 7 years old, my mythological
fancy made me wish to be - not merely to see -
a faun or a satyr. I used to try to imagine that the tops of
my ears were beginning to get pointed, and that a trace of incipient
horns was beginning to appear on my forehead - and bitterly
lamented the fact that my feet were rather slow in turning into
hooves!"
