Written by Lovecraft |
Written about Lovecraft |
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Howard Phillips Lovecraft:
the life of a gentleman from Providence.
Family portrait.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born at 9 a.m. on August 20, 1890, at his family's home at 454 Angell Street ( at that time still 194 ) in Providence, Rhode Island.
His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry back to the arrival of George Phillips in Massachusetts in 1630.
The father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling merchant from Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, in Providence.
When Lovecraft was three years old, his father had a nervous breakdown in a hotel room in Chicago and his father was brought back to Butler Hospital, where he spent 5 years before he died on July 19, 1898.
Lovecraft probably knew that his father was paralyzed and in a coma at that time, but the surviving evidence suggests that the cause of Lovecraft's father's death was semi paralysis.
With the death of his father, the burden of raising the boy fell on the shoulders of his mother, two aunts, and especially his grandfather, the wealthy industrialist Whipple Van Burren Phillips.
Lovecraft was a precocious child: he recited poetry at the age of two, read at the age of three, and began writing at the age of five or six.
His first hobby was "The Arabian Nights", which he read at the age of five; it was at that time that he took the pseudonym "Abdul Alhazred", who later became the author of the mythical"Necronomicon".
But the following year, his Arab interests were overshadowed by the discovery of Greek mythology, which Lovecraft made thanks to Bulfinch's "Age of Myths" and children's versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Indeed, the earliest surviving literary work of Lovecraft is a paraphrase of The Odyssey.
But Lovecraft had already discovered supernatural literature by this time, and his first story, the unreleased "The Noble Spy", can be dated to the beginning of 1896.
His interest in the supernatural was nurtured by his grandfather, who entertained Lovecraft with improvised supernatural stories in the Gothic style.
As a boy, Lovecraft was lonely and often ill, and many of the illnesses were probably psychological.
He rarely attended the school on Slater Avenue, but he got a lot of information by reading.
At the age of eight, he became interested in science, first chemistry, then astronomy.
He began publishing hectographic journals: "Scientific Newspaper" (1899-1907), and " Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy "(1903-07), which he distributed among friends.
When he entered the high school on Hope Street, he found his teachers and peers close to him in spirit and encouraging, and made many friendly acquaintances with children of his own age.
Lovecraft's first appearance in print took place in 1906, when he wrote a letter related to astronomy to the Providence Sunday Magazine.
Soon after, he began writing a monthly astronomical column for the Pawtucket Valley Gleaner, a rural newspaper; later he wrote astronomical columns for the Providence Tribune(1906-08), the Providence Evening News(1914-18) and the Asheville Gazette News(1915).
In 1904, the death of Lovecraft's grandfather and the subsequent loss of his property due to poor management plunged the Lovecraft family into serious financial difficulties.
Lovecraft and his mother had to move into a small apartment at 598 Angel Street from their luxurious Victorian house.
Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of his birthplace, and probably thought about suicide more than once when he made long bicycle trips, looking wistfully at the dark waters of the Barrington River.
However, in 1908, a year before graduation, Lovecraft suffered a nervous breakdown that forced him to leave school without a diploma without graduating.
This fact and the resulting failure in the entrance exams to Brown University caused a sense of shame for Lovecraft in later years, despite the fact that he was one of the most significant self taught people of that time.
In the period from 1908 to 1913, Lovecraft became a real hermit, barely escaping from insanity by following his astronomical interests and writing poetry.
During this period, Lovecraft was in too close a relationship with her mother, who was still suffering from the trauma inflicted on her by her husband's illness and death; and the mother developed a pathological love hate relationship with her son.
Lovecraft escaped from his imprisonment in a rather strange way.
Since he had to read a lot of cheap magazines of that time, he was enraged by the tasteless love stories of some Fred Jackson in the Ship magazine, and wrote a letter attacking Jackson.
This letter was published in 1913 and caused a storm of expressions from the defenders of Jackson.
Lovecraft became embroiled in heated debates in the columns of readers ' letters of The Ship and related magazines, and Lovecraft's notes were almost always written in the manner of the rollicking heroic couplets of Dryden and Pope.
This confrontation was noticed by Edward F.Daas, president of the United Association of Amateur Writers (Yu Hey Pi Hey), a group of writers who published their own magazines.
Daas invited Lovecraft to join the U. A. P. A., and Lovecraft did so in early 1914.
He published 13 issues of his own newspaper "The Conservative"(1915-23), poetry and essays in large quantities in other magazines.
Later, Lovecraft became president and official editor of the U. A. P. A., and was for a time president of the rival National Amateur Writers Association.
This experience must be saved Lovecraft pointless seclusion; as he once said, "In 1914, when a good hand of amateurism was stretched me, I was so close to the plant life, as it can be close to this as any animal...
With the arrival of my life UTD I have been revived; received renewed sense of existence instead of feeling like an unnecessary burden, and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts are not completely meaningless.
For the first time, I realized that my clumsy groping steps in art were something a little more than weak cries, lost in a world that does not listen to me."
Specifically among fans of Lovecraft resumed writing fiction, which he discontinued in 1908.
V. Paul cook and others, noting the makings of a good, shown by Lovecraft in such early works as "the Beast in the Cave"(1905) and "the Alchemist"(1908), has insisted that Lovecraft again took up art pen.
Lovecraft followed this advice, and quickly wrote "The Crypt" and "Dagon" in the summer of 1917 .
Then Lovecraft maintained a constant but weak flow of artistic works, and until 1922 poetry and essays remained the dominant form of his literary expression.
Lovecraft also became involved in an ever growing network of correspondence with friends and colleagues, and eventually became one of the greatest and most prolific letter writers of the 20th century.
Lovecraft's mother, due to the deterioration of her mental and physical condition, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1919 and was placed in the Butler Hospital, from where she, like her husband, never managed to get out alive.
Her death on May 24, 1921, however, was the result of an inept operation on the gallbladder.
Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of his mother, but managed to recover and a few weeks later attended the convention of amateur journalists in Boston on July 4, 1921.
It was there that he first met the woman who later became his wife.
Sonya Hart Green (s) was a Russian Jew and was seven years older than Lovecraft, but they both found each other very close in spirit, at least in the beginning.
Lovecraft visited Sonya at her apartment in Brooklyn in 1922, and the news of their wedding on March 3, 1924 was not a surprise to their friends, but it must have been very surprising to two of Lovecraft's aunts, Lillian D. Clark and Annie Phillips Gamwell, who learned the news from letters sent to them after the ceremony.
Lovecraft moved into Sonya's apartment in Brooklyn, and the future of the young couple seemed cloudless: Lovecraft was a confident writer, thanks to the fact that the famous magazine "Terrible Stories" ("Weird Tales"), founded in 1923, acquired several of his early works; Sonya sold hats and owned a profitable shop on Fifth Avenue in New York.
But almost immediately, the couple got into trouble: the store went bankrupt, Lovecraft missed the chance to become the editor of the companion magazine "Terrible Stories" because they insisted on Lovecraft moving to Chicago, and Sonya's health failed, forcing her to spend some time in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey.
Lovecraft tried to find a job, but few people wanted to hire a thirty four year old with no work experience.
On January 1, 1925, Sonya left for Cleveland to work there, and Lovecraft moved into a one room apartment near the unhealthy Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Despite the fact that Lovecraft had many friends in New York - Frank Belknap Long, Reinhart Kleiner, Samuel Loveman, he was increasingly depressed by his isolation and the masses of" foreigners " in the area.
His prose ceased to be nostalgic ("The Abandoned House" (1924), written in Providence), and became dull and misanthropic ("A Nightmare at Red Hook"(1924) and " He " (1924), which clearly show his feelings for New York).
In early 1926, Lovecraft decided to return to Providence, which he missed fiercely.
But how did Sonya fit into these plans?
It seems that no one knew the answer to this question, and least of all did Lovecraft himself know the answer.
Despite the fact that he continued to admit his love for her, he did not resist when his aunts prevented Sonya from coming to Providence to start working; they considered the marriage of their nephew and a merchant woman unacceptable.
Their marriage, in fact, ended, and a divorce in 1929 was inevitable.
"The Call of Cthulhu".
When Lovecraft returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, and settled at 10 Barnes Street north of Brown University, he did not bury himself as he did between 1908 and 1913; rather, on the contrary, the last 10 years of his life were the heyday of his person and as a writer.
His life was not full of important events - he traveled a lot to various ancient cities of the east coast ( Quebec, New England, Philadelphia, Charleston, St. Augustine ), wrote his best works, such as"The Call of Cthulhu "(1926),"In the Mountains of Madness "(1931) and"The Shadow of Timelessness" (1934-35); he continued his correspondence, striking with its monstrous size - Lovecraft found his niche, the niche of a writer of supernatural literature from New England and a person who loves to write letters.
He has nurtured the careers of many young writers ( August Derleth, Donald Wandray, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber ); he showed an interest in political and economic problems, during the Great Depression he supported Roosevelt and became a moderate socialist; he never tired of gaining knowledge in philosophy, literature, history and architecture.
But the last two years of his life were difficult for Lovecraft.
In 1932, his beloved aunt Mrs. Clark died, and in the thirty third Lovecraft, along with his other aunt Mrs. Gamwell, moved to 66 College Street ( now it is a house at 65 Prospect Street ).
His later stories, long and complex, became difficult to sell, and in order to stay afloat, Lovecraft had to mostly revise and correct stories, poetry and non fiction works.
In 1936, Robert Howard, one of Lovecraft's close pen pals, committed suicide,and this circumstance unsettled Lovecraft.
By this time, the disease that would later cause Lovecraft's death , bowel cancer, had reached a degree that could hardly be cured.
Lovecraft tried to endure increasingly terrible pains in the winter of 36-37, but, in the end, on March 10, 1937, he was admitted to the Jane Brown Hospital, where he died five days later.
He was buried on March 18 on a plot of land owned by the Phillips family in the Swan Point Cemetery.
It seems that seeing his approaching death, Lovecraft imagined complete oblivion of his works: during his lifetime, not a single real book of his was published ( except for the story "The Shadow over Innsmouth"(1936) published by Raw), and his stories, essays and poems were scattered in countless amateur and cheap magazines.
But the friendships established by Lovecraft mainly by correspondence helped him: August Derleth and Donald Wandray decided to save Lovecraft's stories by publishing a decent hardcover book, and founded the publishing house "Arkham House" for this purpose; they published "The Outsider and Other Stories" in 1939.
Arkham House printed many more volumes, and eventually they became available in hardcover and were translated into a dozen languages.
Today, more than a hundred years after his birth, his stories, essays, poetry and letters are widely available, and many scientists have explored the deep features of his work and thoughts.
They still have many discoveries ahead of them, but even now we can say with confidence: thanks to the merits inherent in the works of Lovecraft and the zeal of all those who supported him, Lovecraft occupied a small but honorable niche in the corpus of American and world literature.
S. T. Joshi.
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