Lovecraft also states that he wrote a lengthy treatise, A Brief Course in Astronomy—Descriptive, Practical, and Observational; for Beginners and General Readers, in 1906: ‘it got as far as the typed and hand-illustrated stage (circa one hundred fifty pages), though no copy survives’.40 It is clearly the most substantial scientific work he had ever written or ever would write.
The quotation from ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ with which I opened this chapter suggests how radically the study of astronomy affected Lovecraft’s entire philosophical conception of the universe. Indeed, it is around the period of 1906 that we can definitively date Lovecraft’s philosophical awakening. Previous to that there had been only his various conflicts with church authorities in Sunday school. His first attendance, if it truly dates to the age of seven, saw him taking sides with the Romans against the Christians, but only because of his fondness for Roman history and culture and not out of any specifically anticlerical bias. By the age of nine, as he declares, he was conducting a sort of experimental course in comparative religion, pretending to believe in various faiths to see whether they convinced him; evidently none did. This led to his final Sunday school encounter:
How well I recall my tilts with Sunday-School teachers during my last period of compulsory attendance! I was 12 years of age, and the despair of the institution. None of the answers of my pious preceptors would satisfy me, and my demands that they cease taking things for granted quite upset them. Close reasoning was something new in their little world of Semitic mythology. At last I saw that they were hopelessly bound to unfounded dogmata and traditions, and thenceforward ceased to treat them seriously. SundaySchool became to me simply a place wherein to have a little harmless fun spoofing the pious mossbacks. My mother observed this, and no longer sought to enforce my attendance.41 These sessions presumably occurred at the First Baptist Church, where his mother was still on the rolls.
But years of astronomical study triggered the ‘cosmicism’ that would form so central a pillar of both his philosophical and his aesthetic thought:
By my thirteenth birthday I was thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance, and by my seventeenth, about which time I did some particularly detailed writing on the subject, I had formed in all essential particulars my present pessimistic cosmic views. The futility of all existence began to impress and oppress me; and my references to human progress, formerly hopeful, began to decline in enthusiasm. (‘A Confession of Unfaith’)
Having sloughed off any belief in deity as scientifically unjustified, Lovecraft was left with the awareness that humankind was (probably) alone in the universe—at least, we have no way to establish contact with extraterrestrial races—and that the quantitative insignificance of the planet and all its inhabitants, both spatially and temporally, carried with it the corollary of a qualitative insignificance.
A rather remarkable consequence of Lovecraft’s philosophical interests was a reformist instinct that led him to attempt to educate the masses—or, at least, one member of them. Lovecraft came upon a Swedish boy, Arthur Fredlund, at the Providence Public Library, and brought him frequently to his home to foster his education. The degree to which Lovecraft took Fredlund under his wing is suggested by the fact that Fredlund (no doubt with Lovecraft’s aid) revived and become the editor of The Scientific Gazette, which had been defunct since September 1905. That Lovecraft would have allowed Fredlund to take over the earliest of his scientific periodicals must have meant that he saw great things in the boy. Eventually, however, Lovecraft uncovered unspecified ‘qualities’ in Fredlund that he did not like, so he abandoned him to his ‘plebeian fate’.42
In 1908 Lovecraft stood at the threshold of adulthood: he was doing reasonably well at Hope Street High School, he had become prodigiously learned in chemistry, geography, astronomy, and meteorology, and he was accomplished in belles-lettres as a Latinist, poet, and fiction writer. He seemed destined for a career as an academician of some sort; perhaps he would be a sort of transatlantic version of those later Oxford dons who wrote detective stories, teaching astronomy at a university while writing horror tales in his spare time. In any event, the future for so precocious and accomplished a young man seemed assured.
What derailed that future—and what ensured that Lovecraft would never lead a ‘normal’ life—was his fourth ‘nearbreakdown’, clearly the most serious of his life. In some ways he never recovered from it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Barbarian and Alien (1908–14)
Lovecraft is very reticent about the causes or sources of what we can only regard as a full-fledged nervous breakdown in the summer of 1908. Beyond the mere fact of its occurrence, we know little. Consider four statements, made from 1915 to 1935:
In 1908 I should have entered Brown University, but the broken state of my health rendered the idea absurd. I was and am a prey to intense headaches, insomnia, and general nervous weakness which prevents my continuous application to any thing.1
In 1908 I was about to enter Brown University, when my health completely gave way—causing the necessary abandonment of my college career.2
after all, high-school was a mistake. I liked it, but the strain was too keen for my health, and I suffered a nervous collapse in 1908 immediately after graduating, which prevented altogether my attending college.3
My health did not permit me to go to the university— indeed, the steady application to high-school gave me a sort of breakdown.4
In the first, second, and fourth of these statements Lovecraft is a little disingenuous: he implies that his entry into Brown University was a matter of course, but in fact he never graduated from high school, and certainly would have required at least another year of schooling before he could have done so. The third statement, which states that he actually did graduate, is one of the few instances I have found where Lovecraft plainly lies about himself.
Since we are generally left in the dark about the nature of this breakdown, we can work only on conjecture. We have two pieces of external evidence. One comes from Harry Brobst, who spoke to a woman who had gone to high school with Lovecraft:
She … described these terrible tics that he had—he’d be sitting in his seat and he’d suddenly up and jump—I think they referred to them as seizures. The family took him out of high school, and then whatever education he got presumably was done by private tutors, whatever that meant.5
This certainly is a remarkable account, and suggests that Lovecraft’s chorea minor (if that is what it was) had not entirely worn off even by this time. Brobst, a Ph.D. in psychology who was trained as a psychiatric nurse, considers the possibility of ‘chorea-like symptoms’ and also conjectures that a hysteroid seizure—a purely psychological ailment without any organic basis—may have been involved. Whether these seizures were the actual cause of his removal from high school is something that cannot now be settled.
The other piece of evidence comes from Harold W. Munro, who writes that Lovecraft had been climbing on a house under construction and had fallen, landing on his head.6 Munro does not date this incident (which he himself did not see but only heard about), but he implicitly links it with Lovecraft’s withdrawal from high school.
The breakdown—whether purely mental or nervous or a combination of mental and physical factors—was, clearly, something related to his schoolwork, the same sort of thing that may have caused his milder breakdown of 1906; although even ‘steady application’ in only three classes (all he was taking in his third year at Hope Street) would not seem sufficient to induce so severe a collapse. Note, however, what three courses he was taking: chemistry, physics, and algebra. He was receiving the highest marks in the first two; in algebra he was repeating a part of the course he had taken the previous year. My feeling, therefore, is that Lovecraft’s relative failure to master algebra made him gradually awaken to the realization that he could never do serious professional work in either chemistry or astronomy, and that therefore a career in these two fields was an impossibility. This would have been a shattering conception, requiring a complete revaluation of his career goals. Consider this remark, made in 1931: