The first draft of this tale was written prior to the move from 454 Angell Street in the spring of 1904, and the finished version dates to 21 April 1905. Lovecraft reports having spent ‘days of boning at the library’31 (i.e., the Providence Public Library) in researching the locale of the tale, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. It would take Lovecraft quite some time to learn the wisdom of basing a tale’s locale on first-hand, rather than second-hand, information.
‘The Beast in the Cave’ deals with a man who, lost in Mammoth Cave, comes upon a creature whom he initially takes to be an ape but who proves to be a man who has been lost in the cave for years. The tale is admirably well told and suspenseful, although not many will have failed to guess the conclusion. In spite of Lovecraft’s later dismissal of it as ‘ineffably pompous and Johnsonese’,32 ‘The Beast in the Cave’ is a remarkable story for a fourteen-year-old, and represents a quantum leap over the crudeness of ‘The Mysterious Ship’. Lovecraft is right to declare that in it ‘I first wrote a story worth reading’.33
‘The Alchemist’ (1908) is still more of an advance in style and technique. This tale recounts an ancient aristocratic family in France that appears to be afflicted with a curse whereby the eldest son in each generation dies before the age of thirty-two; but the true cause of the curse is the machinations of Charles Le Sorcier, a magician who has extended his life preternaturally in order to kill each eldest son.
This tale, much more than its predecessor, betrays the influence of Poe in the narrator’s obsessive interest in his own psychological state; indeed, many details in the story make us think of Lovecraft’s remark that he himself ‘felt a kinship to Poe’s gloomy heroes with their broken fortunes’.34 Antoine, the narrator, is of a lofty and ancient line; but ‘poverty but little above the level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour’. As a result, Antoine—an only child—spends his years alone, ‘poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood’; he is kept away from the ‘peasant children’ who dwell nearby. All this can be seen as a deliberately distorted, but still recognizable, reflection of Lovecraft’s own childhood and upbringing. The last page of the autograph manuscript of ‘The Beast in the Cave’ bears the following notation:
Tales of Terror
I. The Beast in the Cave
By H. P. Lovecraft
(Period–Modern)
It is interesting to note that Lovecraft was already at this time thinking of assembling a collection of his tales; we do not know what other tales, if any, were to make up the volume. The autograph manuscript of ‘The Alchemist’ does not survive, so we do not know whether it formed part of this volume; probably it did.
We have only hints of what further tales Lovecraft wrote in the next three years, for he declares that in 1908 he destroyed all but two of the stories he had been writing over the last five years.35 Late in life Lovecraft discovered a composition book bearing the title of one lost story dating to 1905: ‘Gone—But Whither?’ He remarks wryly: ‘I’ll bet it was a hell-raiser! The title expresses the fate of the tale itself.’36 Then there was something called ‘The Picture’ (1907), which in his Commonplace Book he describes as concerning a ‘painting of ultimate horror’. Elsewhere he says of it:
I had a man in a Paris garret paint a mysterious canvas embodying the quintessential essence of all horror. He is found clawed & mangled one morning before his easel. The picture is destroyed, as in a titanic struggle—but in one corner of the frame a bit of canvas remains … & on it the coroner finds to his horror the painted counterpart of the sort of claw which evidently killed the artist.37
There was also a story about a Roman settlement in America, although Lovecraft states that he never completed it.38
By 1908, the time of the fourth ‘near-breakdown’ of his young life, Lovecraft had decided that he was not a fiction-writer, and resolved instead to devote himself to science and belles-lettres. At that time, in spite of the promise shown by ‘The Beast in the Cave’ and ‘The Alchemist’, his decision would not have been entirely unwarranted. Lovecraft had by this time already amassed an impressive record of publications on science, and it would have been reasonable for him to have assumed that he would continue to pursue such a course and become a professional writer in this field.
Lovecraft first broke into true print with a letter (dated 27 May 1906) printed in the Providence Sunday Journal for 3 June; it concerns a point of astronomy. On 16 July 1906 Lovecraft wrote a letter to the Scientific American on the subject of finding planets in the solar system beyond Neptune. Much to his delight, it was published in the issue of 25 August 1906. Around this time, Lovecraft simultaneously began to write two astronomy columns for local papers, the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner and the Providence Tribune (morning, evening, and Sunday editions). The Gleaner articles begin on 27 July 1906, and after a hiatus of a month progress weekly until the end of the year. The Tribune articles commence on 1 August 1906 and proceed monthly until 1 June 1908.
The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner was a weekly based in Phenix, Rhode Island, a community now incorporated into the city of West Warwick, well to the west and south of Providence. Lovecraft describes it as a ‘country paper’ and states that it was ‘more than willing to print & feature anything from Whipple V. Phillips’ grandson’.39 In this letter he maintains that ‘During 1906, 1907, & 1908 I flooded the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner with my prose articles’; but no issues subsequent to 28 December 1906 seem to survive. Evidence exists, however, that the paper did indeed continue at least through 1907, so it appears that we have lost a good many articles that Lovecraft published in it.
The Gleaner articles—many of them based upon corresponding articles or serials in the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy—do more than merely provide information on the astronomical phenomena for the month; they are among the first of several attempts by Lovecraft over the years to educate the public on the fundamentals of astronomy. In the present instance, Lovecraft has chosen provocative queries about Mars, the moon, and the solar system which he believes (probably rightly) the public will find stimulating.
The articles for the Providence Tribune tend to be less interesting only because they rather mechanically deal with the purportedly noteworthy celestial phenomena of each month, becoming somewhat repetitive in the process. They are distinguished, however, for the fact that they are among the few occasions when illustrations by Lovecraft were published: of the twenty articles, sixteen were accompanied by hand-drawn star charts.
My feeling is that a purchase Lovecraft made at this time with his own money—a rebuilt 1906 Remington typewriter—was connected with these published astronomy articles. The typewriter was not used for preparing his hectographed scientific journals (for they remain handwritten to the very end) nor even, apparently, the fiction he was writing (no typescripts from this period survive), so that the preparation of the astronomy columns—the only things he was submitting to a publisher at this time—would be the only logical purpose for securing a typewriter. It was the only typewriter Lovecraft would ever own in his life.