Also at this time Lovecraft himself developed an interest in firearms. Recall that during the initial creation of the Providence Detective Agency he himself, unlike the other boys, sported a real revolver. Lovecraft evidently amassed a fairly impressive collection of rifles, revolvers, and other firearms: ‘After 1904 I had a long succession of 22-calibre rifles, & became a fair shot till my eyes played hell with my accuracy.’26 At this point Lovecraft seemed to lose interest, and he sold off most of his weapons.
Interestingly, Lovecraft began to guide Chester and Harold Munroe into more academic interests, enlisting them as assistants and even colleagues in some of his own intellectual work. The Rhode Island Journal for March 1906 states that a meteorological sub-station has been opened by Harold at his home at 66 Patterson Street. Three months later we hear of the establishment of a Providence Astronomical Society. At this time one of the Munroes assisted Lovecraft in giving a lecture on the sun at the East Side Historical Club by showing lantern slides. I do not imagine that this was anything but a group of Lovecraft’s high school friends; we shall see later that they continued to meet in this fashion for several years.
Rather different was the lecture Lovecraft gave to the Boys’ Club of the First Baptist Church on 25 January 1907.27 This was clearly a formal organization, although I do not believe that Lovecraft was a member: if the contretemps with his Sunday school class (for which see below) dates to 1902, it is not likely that he would have been invited back any time soon. But the mere fact that he gave the lecture may indicate that he had achieved a certain celebrity as an astronomical authority; for he had already become widely published in the local papers by this time.
The death of Lovecraft’s grandfather roughly coincided with the emergence of two new elderly male figures in his personal and intellectual life: his uncles, Dr Franklin Chase Clark (1847–1915) and Edward Francis Gamwell (1869–1936).
Lovecraft became acquainted with Gamwell in 1895, when the latter began courting his aunt Annie Emeline Phillips. Edward and Annie married on 3 January 1897, with the six-year-old Lovecraft serving as usher. Annie went to live with Edward in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Edward was the city editor of the Cambridge Chronicle (1896–1901), then the Cambridge Tribune (1901–12), and then the Boston Budget and Beacon (1913–15). But Annie and Edward visited Providence frequently, especially after the birth on 23 April 1898 of Phillips Gamwell, Lovecraft’s only first cousin on the maternal side. Gamwell taught Lovecraft to recite the Greek alphabet at the age of six, and Lovecraft even maintains that it was his uncle’s extensive editorial capacities that incited him to start The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy.28
Lovecraft was much closer to Dr Clark than to Gamwell, and indeed the former became after Whipple’s death exactly the sort of father replacement Whipple himself had been. Franklin Chase Clark had received an A.B. from Brown University in 1869, as Edward F. Gamwell would in 1894, had attended Harvard Medical School in 1869–70 (where he is likely to have studied with Oliver Wendell Holmes), and had gone on to attain his M.D. at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He married Lillian Delora Phillips on 10 April 1902. Lovecraft does not mention being involved with the wedding, but he probably served in some capacity. One imagines that Lillian left 454 Angell Street at that time and moved in with her husband, who lived at 80 Olney Street.
In spite of Clark’s scientific background, it was in the area of belles-lettres that he exerted the greatest influence on the young Lovecraft. Clark had translated Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, and Statius into English verse, and Lovecraft reports that he ‘did much to correct & purify my faulty style’,29 specifically in verse but also in prose. We can perhaps see Clark’s influence as early as the accomplished classical verses in Poemata Minora, Volume II (1902).
One hopes, however, that Clark did not have any influence on the only surviving poem by Lovecraft between Poemata Minora and the several poems written in 1912: ‘De Triumpho Naturae: The Triumph of Nature over Northern Ignorance’ (July 1905). This poem, dedicated to William Benjamin Smith, author of The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1905), is the first explicitly racist document Lovecraft ever produced; but it was not to be the last. In twenty-four lines Lovecraft paraphrases several central arguments out of Smith’s book: that the Civil War was a tragic mistake; that freeing blacks and granting them civil and political rights is folly; and that in so doing the abolitionists have actually ensured the extinction of the black race in America. How will that occur? The argument expressed in the poem is a little cryptic, and cannot be understood without recourse to Smith’s book. Smith maintains that the inherent biological inferiority of blacks, their physiological and psychological weaknesses, will cause them to perish over time. This allows Smith to conclude that the blacks will simply wither and die. All that can be said in defence of ‘De Triumpho Naturae’ is that it is a little less virulent than Smith.
The whole issue of Lovecraft’s racism is one I shall have to treat throughout this book. It is not likely that at the age of fifteen Lovecraft had formulated clear views on the matter of race, and his attitudes were surely influenced by his environment and upbringing. Recall Winfield Scott Lovecraft’s hallucinations regarding a ‘negro’ who was molesting his wife; it is conceivable that he could have passed on his prejudice against blacks even to his two-yearold son. Lovecraft’s most virulently prejudiced letters were written in the 1920s to his aunt Lillian, who in all likelihood shared his sentiments, as probably did most of the other members of his family.
Lovecraft himself supplies a highly illuminating account of his early views on the subject when he notes his reaction to entering Hope Street High School in 1904:
But Hope Street is near enough to the ‘North End’ to have a considerable Jewish attendance. It was there that I formed my ineradicable aversion to the Semitic race. The Jews were brilliant in their classes—calculatingly and schemingly brilliant—but their ideals were sordid and their manners coarse. I became rather well known as an anti-Semite before I had been at Hope Street many days.30
Lovecraft appears to make that last utterance with some pride. This whole passage is considerably embarrassing to those who wish to exculpate Lovecraft on the ground that he never took any direct actions against the racial or ethnic groups he despised but merely confined his remarks to paper.
‘De Triumpho Naturae’ appears to be an isolated example of this ugly strain in Lovecraft’s early thought and writing; in other regards he continued to pursue abstract intellectual endeavour. A more significant literary product of 1905—one for which Franklin Chase Clark probably provided impetus and guidance—was A Manual of Roman Antiquities. This work very likely gave Lovecraft much-needed practice in sustained prose composition; certainly his prose needed work, if ‘The Mysterious Ship’ was the best he could do in 1902. Something remarkable certainly seems to have happened in the three years subsequent to the writing of ‘The Mysterious Ship’, and it is highly unfortunate that we have no tales from this period. We accordingly find ourselves wholly unprepared for the surprising competence and maturity of the tale entitled ‘The Beast in the Cave’.