But Lovecraft’s days of innocence came to an abrupt end. Whipple Phillips’ Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company had suffered another serious setback when a drainage ditch was washed out by floods in the spring of 1904; Whipple, now an old man of seventy, cracked under the strain, suffering a stroke and dying on 28 March 1904. This blow was bad enough, but there was still worse to come: because of the mismanagement of Whipple’s estate after his death, relatively little was left of his property and funds; so Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of 454 Angell Street and occupy a smaller house at 598 Angell Street.
This was probably the most traumatic event Lovecraft experienced prior to the death of his mother in 1921. By 1904 he and his mother were living alone with his widowed grandfather, as both of his aunts and his uncle had married. With Whipple gone, it would have been both financially and practically absurd to have maintained the huge house at Angell and Elmgrove just for the two of them, and the residence at 598 Angell Street was no doubt chosen because of its propinquity. It was, however, a duplex (the address is 598–600 Angell Street), and Lovecraft and his mother occupied only the western side of the smallish house. One would imagine that these quarters—which Lovecraft describes as five rooms and an attic14—would, in literal terms, still be adequate for a boy and his mother; but psychologically the loss of his birthplace, to one so endowed with a sense of place, was shattering. To compound the tragedy, Lovecraft’s beloved cat, Nigger-Man, disappeared sometime in 1904. This was the only pet Lovecraft ever owned in his life, in spite of his almost idolatrous adoration of the felidae. Nigger-Man’s loss perhaps symbolised the loss of his birthplace as no other event could.
To see exactly what an impact the death of his grandfather, the loss of the family fortune (whatever of it was left by this time— Whipple had left an estate valued only at $25,000, of which $5000 went to Susie and $2500 to Lovecraft15), and the move from his birthplace had on the thirteen-year-old boy, we must read a remarkable letter of 1934:
for the first time I knew what a congested, servantless home—with another family in the same house—was … I felt that I had lost my entire adjustment to the cosmos—for what indeed was HPL without the remembered rooms & hallways & hangings & staircases & statuary & paintings … & yard & walks & cherry-trees & fountain & ivy-grown arch & stable & gardens & all the rest? How could an old man of 14 (& I surely felt that way!) readjust his existence to a skimpy flat & new household programme & inferior outdoor setting in which almost nothing familiar remained? It seemed like a damned futile business to keep on living. No more tutors— high school next September which would probably be a devilish bore, since one couldn’t be as free & easy in high school as one had been during brief snatches at the neighbourly Slater Ave. school … Oh, hell! Why not slough off consciousness altogether?
Was Lovecraft actually contemplating suicide? It certainly seems so—and, incidentally, this seems virtually the only time in Lovecraft’s entire life (idle speculation by later critics notwithstanding) when he seriously thought of self-extinction. What stopped him? Let us read on:
And yet certain elements—notably scientific curiosity & a sense of world drama—held me back. Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answers out of books if I lived & studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments & stratifications get crystallised & upheaved into granite peaks? Geography—just what would Scott & Shackleton & Borchgrevink find in the great white antarctic on their next expeditions … which I could—if I wished—live to see described? And as to history—as I contemplated an exit without further knowledge I became uncomfortably conscious of what I didn’t know. Tantalising gaps existed everywhere. When did people stop speaking Latin & begin to talk Italian & Spanish & French? What on earth ever happened in the black Middle Ages in those parts of the world other than Britain & France (whose story I knew)? What of the vast gulfs of space outside all familiar lands—desert reaches hinted of by Sir John Mandeville & Marco Polo … Tartary, Thibet … What of unknown Africa?16
This is a defining moment in the life of H. P. Lovecraft. How prototypical that it was not family ties, religious beliefs, or even—so far as the evidence of the above letter indicates—the urge to write that kept him from suicide, but scientific curiosity. Lovecraft may never have finished high school, may never have attained a degree from Brown University, and may have been eternally ashamed of his lack of formal schooling; but he was one of the most prodigious autodidacts in modern history, and he continued not merely to add to his store of knowledge to the end of his life but to revise his world view in light of that knowledge. This, perhaps, is what we ought most to admire about him.
In the short term the dreaded commencement of high school proved—to both Lovecraft’s and his family’s surprise—a delight. Hope Street English and Classical High School, at the corner of Hope and Olney Streets (the building, opened in 1898, was on the southeast corner; the present building, on the southwest corner, was opened in 1938), was a good mile from Lovecraft’s 598 Angell Street home, but there was no closer public high school to which he could have gone. Lovecraft on the whole had a very nice time there:
Knowing of my ungovernable temperament, & of my lawless conduct at Slater Avenue, most of my friends (if friends they may be called) predicted disaster for me, when my will should conflict with the authority of Hope Street’s masculine teachers. But a disappointment of the happier sort occurred. The Hope Street preceptors quickly understood my disposition as ‘Abbie’ [i.e. Abbie Hathaway] never understood it; & by removing all restraint, made me apparently their comrade & equal; so that I ceased to think of discipline, but merely comported myself as a gentleman among gentlemen.17 Since there are no independent accounts of Lovecraft’s high school years, we have to accept this statement at face value.
Things were not always entirely harmonious between Lovecraft and his teachers, however. He notes several occasions in which he had various academic disputes, the most celebrated of which was with a ‘fat old lady English teacher’ named Mrs Blake. On one occasion she felt that a paper handed in by Lovecraft sounded like something she had read in a newspaper or magazine, and pointedly questioned its originality. Lovecraft boldly admitted that he had copied it directly from a newspaper, and—’as the good soul’s bewilderment became almost apoplectic’18—pulled out a clipping, ‘Can the Moon Be Reached by Man? By H. P. Lovecraft’—an article he had published in the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner for 12 October 1906. As in several of his Slater Avenue antics, Lovecraft gives the impression of a show-off and smart-alec, and it is perhaps not surprising that his teachers—unsuccessfully, at least as he recounts it—attempted now and again to put him in his place.
It is worth studying what courses Lovecraft actually took during his three years at Hope Street. His transcript survives, and it is full of interesting and suggestive information. The school year lasted for thirty-nine weeks, and most of the courses Lovecraft took covered an entire year; occasionally he took courses lasting only one term, either nineteen or twenty weeks. (In the following enumeration, classes are for thirty-nine weeks save where listed.) Numerical grades were issued; an 80 represented a Certificate grade, 70 a passing grade. During the 1904–05 year, Lovecraft received the following grades: Elementary Algebra (74), Botany (85), English (77), Ancient History (82), and Latin (87). There is not much that is unusual here, except the surprisingly low grade Lovecraft received in English.