But not for Lovecraft himself. True success eluded him throughout his life, and by the time he died he was almost literally penniless.
Insatiable Curiosity
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1890, into circumstances that appeared more promising than they really were. His mother’s family was well off; her father, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, was a noted businessman who was happy to pander to his grandson, an only child. But Lovecraft’s father suffered from mental illness and was confined to an institution when the boy was just three. It was the last they saw of each other.
The Phillips grandparents stepped in to help raise young Howard, encouraging him to read the classics from an early age – everything from Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Edgar Allan Poe to Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and indulging his ‘insatiable curiosity’ for chemistry by buying him books and apparatus for his little laboratory in the basement. ‘Being a “spoiled child” I had but to ask, and it was mine,’ he later recalled. By the age of nine, he was producing a magazine called The Scientific Gazette.
But Lovecraft was a sickly child, suffering general ill health and several nervous breakdowns through his youth. After the death of his grandmother when he was six, he ‘began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, peopled with things which [he] called “night-gaunts”’. When his grandfather died a few years later, he became ‘the most miserable of mortals’. As for friends and playmates: ‘I had none!’
The worst of his breakdowns occurred shortly before he was due to graduate from high school, as a result of which college was out of the question. Instead, isolated from his peers and the conventional trajectory into adult life, he spent what would have been his college years immersing himself in the science and literature of the eighteenth century, ‘of which I felt myself so oddly a part’.
Weird Tales
Lovecraft entered adulthood unqualified and insecure, but better read than anyone he knew. After some modest forays into journalism – letters to pulp-fiction magazines and a monthly astronomy column for the Providence Evening News – he was invited in 1914 to join the United Amateur Press Association. This validation set him on to a flurry of writing and submitting stories, poems and essays, and, although he remained reclusive and communicated mainly by letter, he started to hope that he might make his name as a writer of ‘weird tales’.
The Vagrant magazine was the first to showcase his work, publishing ‘The Alchemist’ (written in 1908) and ‘The Beast in the Cave’ (1905) in 1916 and 1918 respectively, followed soon after by ‘The Tomb’ and ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’. In 1919 it printed ‘Dagon’, a story often credited as foreshadowing the Cthulhu stories for which Lovecraft remains best known. Like the later cycle of stories, ‘Dagon’ introduces a creature of such horrifying size and power that it exposes humankind as both naive and insignificant.
All the while, Lovecraft continued to read voraciously, discovering great horror writers such as M. R. James and Guy de Maupassant, as well as the fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, who he later said influenced him more than anyone except his ‘God of Fiction’, Edgar Allan Poe. In 1922, he plucked up the courage to write to a new literary hero of his, Clark Ashton Smith, sparking a correspondence that would continue for the rest of his life.
By the time the magazine Weird Tales was launched in 1923, Lovecraft was well enough known to be of interest to its editors. Between 1924 and 1926, in a successful attempt to boost circulation, they commissioned him to ghost-write (albeit without credit) a series of stories conceived by Harry Houdini.
Success and Rejection
In 1921, shortly after the death of his mother, Lovecraft met writer and businesswoman Sonia H. Greene at a National Amateur Press Association convention. They married in 1924 and moved to New York City, where they were surrounded by other writers on the pulp-fiction scene (Lovecraft was soon accepted into the Kalem Club, a group of like-minded authors whose surnames all began with K, L or M).
As his cultish fame grew through his popularity with the editors and readers of Weird Tales, particularly after the magazine published the hugely influential ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ in 1928, his circle of literary acquaintances became more intensely focused around him personally. The so-called Lovecraft Circle, which included Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and August Derleth, was in no doubt about Lovecraft’s brilliance, finding in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ the seeds of what they called a ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, a fully formed universe with its own pantheon of ancient deities, in which Derleth and others soon began setting their own stories.
Lovecraft himself remained intensely insecure about his own work, however (he’d originally considered ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ ‘rather middling’), and was swallowed by waves of despondency whenever Weird Tales declined to publish a story. When his novella At the Mountains of Madness was rejected for being too long, he despaired that he had ‘failed to crystallise the mood I was trying to crystallise’. Convinced that he was becoming ‘a parody on the only thing in life that means anything to me’, he didn’t even submit 1933’s ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ to the magazine, and it only appeared there after his death.
I Am Providence
Lovecraft’s marriage to Sonia H. Greene was not a success. He was eternally on the verge of destitution and she suffered from bouts of ill health, and within two years they were living apart. In many ways he felt New York was to blame, and that he had made a terrible mistake in moving there at all. Writing to his aunt Lillian in 1926, he exclaimed, ‘It is New England I must have – in some form or other. Providence is part of me – I am Providence … Providence is my home, & there I shall end my days.’
With the marriage over, Lovecraft did just that: he moved back to Providence and continued writing stories, surviving on an inheritance until it ran out. By the time he was diagnosed with cancer in 1937, he was subsisting on almost nothing, and he died that year aged forty-six.
In his heart of hearts Lovecraft had always longed to secure a book deal, and felt that ‘incidental magazine placements’ compromised a serious writer’s ‘intellectual & aesthetic integrity’. It was only in the wake of his death that his true contribution to the weird-fiction canon – and to the many writers who continued in his footsteps – became apparent. Weird Tales had an enormous cache of unpublished stories and was able to print ‘new’ Lovecraft work for years after he died. By the 1960s he had garnered a new cult following of readers who valued him as an outsider, a rebel and an artist who challenged the world order.
‘The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion,’ Lovecraft had written to Clark Ashton Smith in 1930, ‘and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity.’
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.
It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation;