Lovecraft, in speaking of the steady economic decline of the family, notes ‘several sharp jogs downward, as when an uncle lost a lot of dough for my mother and me in 1911’.16 Faig is almost certainly correct in identifying this uncle as Susie’s brother Edwin E. Phillips.17 Edwin had difficulty even maintaining his own economic position, as his chequered employment record indicates. We do not, of course, know how Edwin lost money for Susie and Howard, but one suspects that it had something to do with bad investments, which not only failed to yield interest but also dissolved the capital.
The effect of all this on Susie, and on her view of her son, can only be conjectured. Consider the following disturbing anecdote related by Clara Hess, which I believe dates to around this time if not a little earlier:
when she [Susie] moved into the little downstairs flat in the house on Angell Street around the corner from Butler Avenue I met her often on the Butler Avenue cars, and one day after many urgent invitations I went in to call upon her. She was considered then to be getting rather odd. My call was pleasant enough but the house had a strange and shutup air and the atmosphere seemed weird and Mrs. Lovecraft talked continuously of her unfortunate son who was so hideous that he hid from everyone and did not like to walk upon the streets where people could gaze at him.
When I protested that she was exaggerating and that he should not feel that way, she looked at me with a rather pitiful look as though I did not understand about it. I remember that I was glad to get out in the fresh air and sunshine and that I did not repeat my visit.18
This is one of the most notorious pieces of evidence regarding Lovecraft and his mother, and I see no reason why we should not accept it. The reference to ‘hideous’ is presumably to his physical appearance, and this is why I want to date the anecdote to Lovecraft’s late teens or early twenties: as a younger boy he is so normal-looking that no one—even a mother who was getting a little ‘odd’—could have deemed him hideous; but by the age of eighteen or twenty he had perhaps reached his full height of five feet eleven inches, and had probably developed that long, prognathous jaw which he himself in later years considered a physical defect. Harold W. Munro notes that as early as his high school years Lovecraft was bothered by ingrown facial hairs; but when Munro speaks of ‘mean red cuts’ on Lovecraft’s face he evidently believes these to have been the product of a dull razor. In fact, as Lovecraft attests, these cuts came from his using a needle and tweezers to pull out the ingrown hairs.19 This recurring ailment—which did not subside until Lovecraft was well into his thirties—may also have negatively affected his perception of his appearance. As late as February 1921, only a few months before his mother’s death, Lovecraft writes to his mother of a new suit that ‘made me appear as nearly respectable as my face permits’.20
I am of course not trying to defend this remark by Lovecraft’s mother—surely no mother ought ever to say such a thing about her son, no matter how ugly he in fact is—and it may also be that her comment has a somewhat broader implication. It has often been conjectured that she was transferring to her son the hatred and disgust she felt for her husband after he was stricken with syphilis, and I think this is very likely. Susie, of course, is not likely to have known the exact nature or causes of her husband’s ailment—the doctors themselves did not do so—but she may have sensed that something relating to sex had afflicted him; and, now that her own son was developing into an adult male with burgeoning sexual instincts, she may have feared that he might turn out very much like her husband—especially if Lovecraft had at this time taken to wearing his father’s clothing. In any case, I do not think we have any grounds to deny that she made the ‘hideous’ remark; Lovecraft himself once (and only once) admitted to his wife that his mother’s attitude to him was (and this is his word) ‘devastating’,21 and we need look no further for the reasons for that than this single comment.
Both Clara Hess and Harold W. Munro give evidence that Lovecraft did indeed avoid human contact in his post-high-school period. Hess writes: ‘Sometimes I would see Howard when walking up Angell Street, but he would not speak and would stare ahead with his coat collar turned up and chin down.’22 Munro states: ‘Very much an introvert, he darted about like a sleuth, hunched over, always with books or papers clutched under his arm, peering straight ahead recognizing nobody.’23
We have the merest scraps of information as to what Lovecraft was actually doing during this entire period. One highly suggestive datum is his admission that he visited Moosup Valley, and specifically the Stephen Place house in Foster (birthplace of his mother and grandmother), in 1908. This visit can scarcely have been purely recreational. His mother accompanied him, as there is a photograph of her (probably taken by Lovecraft himself) standing in front of the house.24 Once again it seems as if Lovecraft required some sort of renewal of ancestral ties to help him out of a difficult psychological trauma; but in this case the visit seems to have accomplished little.
The record for 1909 (aside from his astronomical observations and the correspondence courses) is entirely blank. For 1910 we know that he saw Halley’s Comet, but probably not at Ladd Observatory. In 1918 he stated:
I no more visit the Ladd Observatory or various other attractions of Brown University. Once I expected to utilise them as a regularly entered student, and some day perhaps control some of them as a faculty member. But having known them with this ‘inside’ attitude, I am today unwilling to visit them as a casual outsider and non-university barbarian and alien.25
This sense of alienation presumably began soon after his collapse in 1908, and he probably saw Halley’s with his own telescope. He mentions that he missed seeing a bright comet earlier that year ‘by being flat in bed with a hellish case of measles!’26 Elsewhere he states that he lost 54 pounds during this bout with the measles and nearly died.27 The year 1910 was, however, the period of his most frequent attendance of stage plays, and he reports seeing many Shakespeare productions at the Providence Opera House that year. He also visited Cambridge, Massachusetts—probably to see his aunt Annie Gamwell and his twelve-year-old cousin Phillips. He celebrated his twenty-first birthday—20 August 1911—by riding the electric trolley cars all day, going through the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts before coming home.
Did Lovecraft continue to associate with his boyhood friends? The evidence is a little ambiguous. No doubt he felt a certain sense of failure and defeat as he saw his high school friends marry, find jobs, and in general take on the responsibilities of adult life. But consider this remarkable testimony from Addison P. Munroe, whom Winfield Townley Scott interviewed:
He lived but a few houses distant from our own home and was quite frequently over here with our sons. I remember that we had a room fixed up in our basement for the boys to use as a club room, which was a popular place with Howard. The club, so called, consisted of about a half-dozen of the neighborhood boys, around twenty years of age, and when they had a so-called ‘banquet,’ improvised and usually selfcooked, Howard was always the speaker of the evening and my boys always said he delivered addresses that were gems.28
This appears to be East Side Historical Club, still meeting even after the boys had graduated from high school. If Munroe is right about the boys’ age, then these sessions would have occurred exactly at the time (1910) when Lovecraft was maintaining that he ‘shunned all human society’,29 in particular his friends. Lovecraft, in fact, never lost touch with the Munroes, as a number of subsequent events will demonstrate; and Addison P. Munroe may well be right about both the nature and the date of these meetings. Lovecraft gives a picture of his literary production during this ‘empty’ period: