H. G. Wells, ca. 1920.
Lovecraft’s efforts in the new field of science fiction owe a clear debt to Herbert George Wells (1866–1946), who wrote as H. G. Wells. Wells produced more than 120 books, and his first, the one that was to lift science fiction to the heights of literature, was The Time Machine (1895). In an age in love with the machine and progress, Wells shared a vision of the earth’s future that was pessimistic to an extreme. In The Time Machine, the time traveler stands alone at the end of the world: “. . . the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”
Wells is best remembered for his shocking War of the Worlds (1898); its infamous and convincing 1938 radio dramatization, narrated by Orson Welles, provoked mass hysteria. Wells posited that an ancient race of Martians in need of fresh territories mounted an invasion of Earth by means of ships shot from large guns: “Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” The Martians subjugate the population with heat-rays, the “Black Smoke,” and other weapons and roam the landscape at will, only to succumb to infections from bacteria indigenous to Earth. The story of a future war was not original, as mentioned above; nonetheless, the idea that the war would involve combat with extraterrestrial life was new.18 “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” as well as Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” and At the Mountains of Madness, may be said to have built on this idea.
In addition to a number of ingenious and compelling short stories, Wells also produced in quick succession such important works as The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904). Lovecraft called The War of the Worlds a “semi-classic,” and Wells’s influence on him is readily apparent, particularly with respect to Lovecraft’s “cosmicism,” which we will explore later.
In his essay “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction,”19 Lovecraft rails,
Despite the current flood of stories dealing with other worlds and universes, and with intrepid flights to and from them through cosmic space, it is probably no exaggeration to say that not more than a half-dozen of these things, including the novels of H. G. Wells, have even the slightest shadow of a claim to artistic seriousness or literary rank. Insincerity, conventionality, tiredness, artificiality, false emotion, and puerile extravagance reign triumphant throughout this overcrowded genre, so that none but its rarest products can possibly claim a truly adult status.
An 1896 issue of Argosy.
For many writers in the dual genres of horror and science fiction, a primary American marketplace for their work was the so-called pulp magazines. Here, Lovecraft was no exception. It appears that he read widely and voraciously in the pulps, though he later concealed this,20 and virtually all of his stories published during his lifetime that did not appear in amateur publications (and reprints of some that did) were printed in the pulp magazines. The first of these was Frank Munsey’s revamped Argosy Magazine of 1896. Advances in printing technology had made “dime novels” widely available to readers, but prior to Munsey’s Argosy, no magazine had put affordable entertainment—low-cost, pulp-printed, flimsy magazines—in the hands of the working class. At its height in 1902, Argosy had achieved circulation of a half-million copies per issue. At ten cents per copy, these were comparable to such publications as the Strand Magazine in England, which sold for sixpence a copy.21
Argosy by 1906.
The Popular Magazine, April 1915.
A milestone for the American pulps occurred in 1905, when Street & Smith, publishers of Popular magazine, acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha, by H. Rider Haggard, a sequel to his well-received novel She. In 1907 the cover price of Popular rose to 15 cents, but, with determined efforts to build a stable of popular authors, circulation began to near that of Argosy. With the innovation of genre-specific titles, focusing on detective stories, romance, and the like, the magazines flourished, and by the 1920s, at the peak of their popularity, successful pulps were selling up to 1 million copies per issue. Among the best-known genre-specific titles of this period were Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flying Aces, Horror Stories, Love Story, Marvel Tales, Oriental Stories, Planet Stories, Spicy Detective, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Unknown, Weird Tales, and Western Story. While the magazines paid notoriously low fees, then little-known authors such as Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sax Rohmer, Dashiell Hammett, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith got their start in the pages of the pulp magazines. The influence on Lovecraft’s work of many of these writers—and other pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, Victor Rousseau, George Allan England, and A. Merritt—was enormous.22 Specific Lovecraftian plot elements, such as lost cities and civilizations, Atlantis and other lost continents, mind-transfers, savagery, cannibalism, and vanished races, all can be found in the pulp magazines, though in Lovecraft’s hands these became transformed into embodiments of his ideas about elitism and “cosmicism,” discussed in “Lovecraft’s Philosophy and the Cthulhu Mythos,” below.23
LIFE OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
THE EXTERNAL LIFE of Howard Phillips Lovecraft is simple enough to limn; details of his writing career will be considered separately.24 Peter Cannon, in his essential H. P. Lovecraft, sums up the author’s life’s activities as follows: “contributing to amateur journals, composing eighteenth century verse, revising the works of talentless would-be authors, and on occasion publishing highly original horror fiction in pulp magazines like Weird Tales—all far removed from the literary mainstream.” Indeed, much of Lovecraft’s day-to-day life was itself far removed from the mainstream, as a matter of choice.25
The Lovecraft family, 1892.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, ca. 1892.
Lovecraft was born of solid New England stock—his great-grandfather moved to Canada in 1827 and shortly thereafter to Rochester, New York; his mother’s ancestors came to America in 1630, ten years after the arrival of the Mayflower. He lived virtually his entire life in Providence, Rhode Island. Born on August 20, 1890, to Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, he lost his father, in a real sense, almost immediately, for when Howard was three, his father was confined to Butler Hospital for the Insane,26 in Providence, where he remained until his death in 1898, almost certainly a victim of paresis caused by syphilis (though Lovecraft characterized it as “nervous exhaustion”). The young Lovecraft was raised by his mother, who was known as Susie, his two aunts, and his maternal grandfather.
Lovecraft as a boy.
Apparently a prodigy, mastering the alphabet at two, reading at three, and composing poetry by age seven,27 Howard nonetheless seems to have had an active and sociable childhood. In 1904 the death of his grandfather brought severe financial hardship to Howard’s family, and he and his mother moved into a modest apartment. Always a sickly child prone to nerves and fatigue, as a fourteen-year-old he fell victim to illness, probably psychologically induced, and he dropped out of high school in 1908, after completing the eleventh grade. By then his health “completely gave way,” according to his own account, and he abandoned thoughts of college. Under the strong influence of his mother, Lovecraft was declared unfit for the military and sat out the Great War.
Lovecraft’s official United Press Association photograph, 1915.
For the next ten or eleven years, Lovecraft occupied himself with amateur journalism. Despite his avowed worship of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work he first read at the age of eight, his passions were chemistry, astronomy, and the Greek and Roman classics, and these interests are reflected in his sparse writings during this youthful period. In 1919, a major ch
ange occurred in the young man’s life: After extended periods of depression and what was then termed hysteria, his mother, too, was confined to Butler Hospital, where she died in 1921. Lovecraft’s biographers have expressed various judgments of Susie Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi, for example, states that she “psychologically damaged Lovecraft at least to the point of declaring him physically hideous and perhaps in other ways that are now irrecoverable.”28 Kenneth W. Faig Jr., however, asserts that Lovecraft’s “finely honed aesthetic sensibilities and seasoned artistic judgment” were the result of her influence, and he points out that she indulged the young man in developing interests in chemistry, astronomy, and various mythologies.29 “My mother was, in all probability,” wrote Lovecraft in 1921, shortly after her death, “the only person who thoroughly understood me, with the possible exception of Alfred Galpin.”30
Lovecraft’s initial response to his mother’s death was predictable: “The death of my mother . . . gave me an extreme nervous shock, and I find concentration and continuous endeavour quite impossible.”31 Not long after, however, Lovecraft’s health improved considerably, as he admitted, perhaps disingenuously, in a letter in 1931: “My health improved vastly and rapidly, though without any ascertainable cause, about 1920–21.”32 A few weeks after Susie died, he attended an amateur press convention in Boston, where he met Sonia Greene, a Ukrainian Jew seven years his elder, who had her own aspirations as a writer. At the time, Greene was an executive of a hat shop in New York. He said of her initially, “Mrs. G. has an acute, receptive, and well-stored mind. . . .” Others described her as “Junoesque” and very attractive, but Lovecraft expressed nothing more until, after an apparently persistent courtship press by Sonia, they married in 1924. The marriage engendered surprise, shock, and even alarm among their friends, and Lovecraft’s description of the relationship may well explain those responses:
Marriage certificate of Lovecraft and Sonia Haft-Greene, 1924.
[I]t began to be apparent that I was not alone in finding psychological solitude more or less of a handicap. A detailed intellectual and aesthetic acquaintance since 1921, and a three-months visit in 1922 wherein congeniality was tested and found perfect in an infinity of ways, furnished abundant proof not only that S.H.G. is the most inspiriting and encouraging influence which could possibly be brought to bear on me, but that she herself had begun to find me more congenial than anyone else, and had come to depend to a great extent on my correspondence and conversation for mental contentment and artistic and philosophical enjoyment.33
Lovecraft moved to New York, where he and Sonia took up residence at 259 Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn (now the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Flatbush). Brooklyn, with its farms and gardens, was viewed by many as a refuge from the bustle of the city, but the 1920s saw massive changes there, as roads were paved, sewers installed, and the Coney Island boardwalk opened, and as crowds of immigrants arrived to stay. Lovecraft remained in New York for two years. Greene, meanwhile, opened her own hat shop, which lasted for a brief period only; when she lost the shop, she found employment in Cincinnati (apparently through a want ad) and, at the beginning of 1925, after only ten months of cohabitation with Lovecraft, moved to Ohio to work.34 She visited Lovecraft from time to time in Brooklyn and took care to send him money regularly, but after Sonia’s departure, Lovecraft lived near the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn in a state of penury and near-starvation. Although he had had hopes of success in the New York literary world, he made only slight efforts to find employment and spent his time with friends he seemed to have little or no trouble acquiring and cultivating.
Sonia Greene Lovecraft.
Lovecraft apparently hated the city: In a letter describing a brief trip to Philadelphia during this period, he contrasted New York and Philadelphia: “None of the crude, foreign hostility & underbreeding of New York—none of the vulgar trade spirit & plebeian hustle. A city of real American background—an integral & continuous outgrowth of a definite & aristocratic past instead of an Asiatic hell’s huddle of the world’s cowed, broken, inartistic, & unfit.”35 He despised the immigrant population. Sonia described his experiences walking in New York: “[W]henever he would meet crowds of people—in the subway, or, at the noon hour, on the sidewalks in Broadway, or crowds, wherever he happened to find them, and these were usually the workers of minority races—he would become livid with anger and rage.”36 In a letter, she elaborates: “[H]e became livid with rage at the foreign elements he would see in large number, especially at noon-time, in the streets of New York City, and I would try to calm his outbursts by saying: ‘You don’t have to love them; but hating them so outrageously can’t do any good.’ It was then that he said: ‘It is more important to know what to hate than it is to know what to love.’ ”37
The apartment Lovecraft occupied with Sonia Greene Lovecraft, 259 Parkside Avenue, Brooklyn, shown in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
Lovecraft’s apartment at 169 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, shown in 2010. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
Alienated from the city, unable to write, and separated from Greene, he capitulated and returned to Providence in the spring of 1926, where he remained for the rest of his life. “[I]n New York I could not live. Everything I saw became unreal & two-dimensional, & everything I thought & did became trivial & devoid of meaning through lack of any points of reference belonging to any fabric of which I could conceivably form a part. I was stifled—poisoned—imprisoned in a nightmare—& now not even the threat of damnation could induce me to dwell in the accursed place again.”38 Neither he nor Sonia said much about the failure of the marriage. Lovecraft spoke of the need for “the inviolate integrity” of his cerebral life. Sonia told one friend that Lovecraft’s harping hatred of Jews was the primary reason for their estrangement and separation.39 Whatever their private reasons, the couple’s divorce was never finalized. Lovecraft traveled occasionally in the eastern United States, his farthest destination being a sightseeing trip to New Orleans, but appeared to prefer a frugal life at home. He lived alone until 1933, when he moved in with his aged aunt, Annie Gamwell, allowing the two to pool their meager resources. Three years later he developed cancer of the intestine. He died in 1937.
Sonia Greene Lovecraft, probably in 1921.
Sonia Greene Davis, ca. 1950.
Lovecraft’s aunt Annie Gamwell, outside the apartment they shared at 66 College Street in Providence, ca. 1933.
Lovecraft’s gravestone in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence. Photograph copyright © Donovan K. Loucks 2010, reprinted with permission
Lovecraft’s last will, executed in 1912 (at the age of twenty-two).
A page from Lovecraft’s publication Rhode Island Journal of Science and Astronomy, prepared when he was fourteen.
LOVECRAFT’S LITERARY CAREER
THIS BARE OUTLINE of Lovecraft’s life reveals little of what must be deemed a nearly incredible amount of writing. Early on, Lovecraft wrote a large quantity of scientific material, principally focused on astronomy. His first published piece, a criticism of the “science” of astrology, appeared in 1906 in the Providence Sunday Journal. Later that year, he had a letter printed in Scientific American on trans-Neptunian objects. He produced two periodicals of his own, the Scientific Gazette and the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy. His main outlet at this stage, however, was a regular monthly column on astronomy for the Providence Tribune.
As a result of frequent appearances in the letters column of Argosy, one of the most popular of the Munsey magazines,40 he was recruited in 1914 by the United Amateur Press Association, a group of correspondents who circulated among themselves in amateur journals criticism of their own poetry and prose. Lovecraft started his own journal in 1915 (the Conservative), which ran for thirteen issues, and engaged in the politics of the highly vocal organization, eventually serving as its president. He wrote numerous essays expressing his political views and philosophical be
liefs as well as extensive criticism of amateur and commercial publications. Lovecraft even proposed a course of pedagogy to lift the standards of amateur journalism—to teach grammar, rhetoric, and versification to budding writers—and the creation of suggested reading lists. He attended conventions as far away as Boston and found himself with a growing circle of friends, many of them as amateurishly devoted to writing as he was.
A postcard from Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith dated December 14, 1933.
These friends inspired Lovecraft’s major written output, which took the form of letters and postcards. Peter Cannon, in H. P. Lovecraft, calls him “the Horace Walpole of this [twentieth] century, a compulsive communicator who generated in his abbreviated lifetime tens of thousands of missives, ranging from postcards to treatises forty, fifty, sixty, even seventy, closely handwritten pages long.” Although five volumes of Selected Letters have been published, these comprise only 930 letters, a tiny fraction of Lovecraft’s estimated epistolary output. S. T. Joshi, the leading Lovecraft scholar, has begun to issue a complete collection of Lovecraft’s extant correspondence.41 The letters that have been studied cover a remarkable range of subjects, from ancient Rome to views on ice-cream flavors, but also shed much light on Lovecraft’s influences, sources, and philosophies. These biographical aspects are explored in depth in the volumes of annotated stories edited by Joshi; the present edition has made use of them outside this foreword only for purposes of interpretation of the texts of the stories.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 3