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Malcolm Streitfeld

Piecing Together Lovecraft

Malcolm Streitfeld

Assistant Arts Editor


(Disclaimer: This article mentions depression and suicide).


“I am Providence, & Providence is myself—together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro’ the ages; a fixt monument set eternally in the shadow of Durfee’s ice-clad peak!”- H.P Lovecraft in a letter to James Ferdinand Morton. Written on May 16th, 1926.


Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a man that’s as enigmatic as the stories he penned. The more I’ve delved into his work, the more I’ve wondered, just who really is this prophet lurking behind the curtain of the uncanny? Is he really just a racist and a xenophobe or is there more to him than meets the eye?


Lovecraft's childhood was a tragic one. He was born on August 20th, 1890. Lovecraft was three when his father Winfield fell into a catatonic state. Winfield lived out the rest of his days at Butler Hospital, dying from syphilis when Lovecraft was just eight years old. This left Lovecraft with just his mother Susie and grandpa Whipple. Sadly, Whipple also passed away on March 27th, 1904. This is when Lovecraft’s psyche went from bad to worse. He and his mother were moved from their Victorian quarters to a cramped house on Angell Street. Susie from then on was very cruel to her son. As a neighbor recounted,Mrs. Lovecraft talked continuously of her son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people would gaze at him,” a statement the neighbor considered “exaggerated.” She was also overprotective of him and kept him from the outside world. In a letter addressed to Alfred Gaplin written in May 1918, Lovecraft stated “…I am only about half alive – a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me…”


Photo by Malcolm Streitfeld

Finally, Lovecraft had had enough. He contemplated suicide by throwing himself into the Barrington River. He penned, “How easy it would be to wade out among the rushes & lie face down in the warm water till oblivion came. There would be a certain gurgling or choking unpleasantness at first– but it would soon be over. Then the long peaceful night of non-existence." Thankfully, he refrained from this course of action. In a letter to Rheinhart Kliener dated November 16th, 1916, Lovecraft writes "I began to have nightmares of the most hideous description, people with things which I called ‘night-gaunts’—a compound word of my own coinage. I used to draw them after waking (perhaps the idea of these figures came from an edition de luxe of Paradise Lost with illustrations by Doré, which I discovered one day in the east parlour)." In fact, Lovecraft suffered from sleep paralysis, a type of parasomnia. Interestingly, Lovecraft started having these night terrors in 1896, around the time his grandmother passed away.


In addition to parasomnia, Lovecraft may have suffered from bouts of social anxiety. As he wrote in a letter to his aunt Lillian D. Clark on March 29th, 1926, “I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous– that only be an accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn’t.”


It wasn’t until I visited the Lovecraft convention NecronomiCon that everything clicked. One of the panel speakers said that without Lovecraft’s racism and xenophobia, we would not have his work. That’s when it hit me. All of Lovecraft’s fears about what he could not understand, from the syphilis that claimed his father to the immigrant neighborhoods from which he was repulsed, manifested themselves as monsters like the Elder Things from At the Mountains of Madness and that amorphous mass from the Color out of Space. The very things he is rightfully criticized for today were in a twist bizarrely fitting of Lovecraft, responsible for his greatest masterpieces. H.P. Lovecraft in the end was someone who managed to give his anxiety flesh.

 

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