Chemical writing—plus a little historical and antiquarian research—filled my years of feebleness till about 1911, when I had a reaction toward literature. I then gave my prose style the greatest overhauling it has ever had; purging it at once of some vile journalese and some absurd Johnsonianism. Little by little I felt that I was forging the instrument I ought to have forged a decade ago—a decent style capable of expressing what I wished tosay. But I still wrote verse and persisted in the delusion that I was a poet.30
The curious thing about this is that we have very few examples of his expository prose between ‘The Alchemist’ (1908) and the beginning of his astronomy column for the Providence Evening News on 1 January 1914. What we do have are a series of poems presumably written ‘about 1911’ or sometime thereafter. Few of these are at all distinguished, but one is of consuming biographical interest: ‘The Members of the Men’s Club of the First Universalist Church of Providence, R.I., to Its President, About to Leave for Florida on Account of His Health’.
There is no clear way of dating this poem, and it may have been written as early as 1910 or as late as 1914; but what is remarkable about it is its mere existence, indicating that Lovecraft was a member of this men’s club. The First Universalist Society, established in Providence since 1821, had a new church built in 1872 at the corner of Greene and Washington Streets, near the Providence Public Library; and this must have been where Lovecraft went when he participated in the men’s club. I can only sense the hand of Lovecraft’s mother in this entire enterprise: having failed on at least two occasions to inculcate standard Sunday school training in him as a boy, she perhaps felt that a less rigidly doctrinal church would be more to his liking. Actually, in all likelihood it was a means of preventing Lovecraft from becoming wholly withdrawn from society—in effect, of getting him out of the house every now and then.
The other poems written around this time similarly concern themselves with local affairs, and unfortunately their one clear thematic link is racism. ‘Providence in 2000 A.D.’ is Lovecraft’s first published poem, appearing in the Evening Bulletin for 4 March 1912. It is actually quite funny, although much of the humour would not be very well received today. The parenthetical prose paragraph that prefaces the poem—’(It is announced in the Providence Journal that the Italians desire to alter the name of Atwell’s Avenue to “Columbus Avenue”)’—tells the whole story: Lovecraft ridicules the idea that the Italians of the Federal Hill area have any right to change the Yankee-bestowed name of the principal thoroughfare of their own district. (The street was never renamed.) The satire tells of an Englishman who, in the year 2000, returns to Rhode Island, the land of his forebears, and finds everything foreignized. The fact that the Evening Bulletin published this poem must mean that others aside from Lovecraft found it funny.
Other poems of this period are much nastier, but were not published at the time. ‘New-England Fallen’ (April 1912) is a wretched 152-line spasm speaking of some mythical time when hard-working, pious Anglo-Saxon yeomen established the dominant culture of New England only to have ‘foreign boors’ infiltrate the society and corrupt it from within:
The village rings with ribald foreign cries;
Around the wine-shops loaf with bleary eyes A vicious crew, that mock the name of ‘man’, Yet dare to call themselves ‘American’.
This is surely close to the nadir of Lovecraft’s poetic output—not only for the ignorant racism involved, but for its array of trite, hackneyed imagery and nauseating sentimentality in depicting the blissful life of the stolid yeoman farmer. Perhaps only the notorious ‘On the Creation of Niggers’ (1912) exceeds this specimen in vileness. Here is the entire poem:
When, long ago, the Gods created Earth,
In Jove’s fair image Man was shap’d at birth. The beasts for lesser parts were next design’d; Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill this gap, and join the rest to man,
Th’ Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure, Fill’d it with vice, and call’d the thing a NIGGER.
No publication has been found for this poem. The text survives, however, in a hectographed copy, which suggests that Lovecraft may at least have passed this poem around to friends or family; it is likely that they approved—or at least did not object—to his sentiments.
A somewhat more innocuous poem is ‘Quinsnicket Park’, which Lovecraft dates to 1913. Quinsnicket Park (now called Lincoln Woods Park) is situated four miles north of Providence, and was one of Lovecraft’s favourite sylvan retreats; throughout his life he would walk there and read or write in the open air. His 117-line paean to this rustic haven is trite, wooden, and mechanical.
We do not know much else about Lovecraft’s specific activities during these years. It is likely that he sequestered himself in his study and read enormous quanitites of books, whether it be science or belles lettres; it was probably at this time that he laid the foundations for that later erudition in so many fields which astounded his colleagues. No doubt he continued to read weird fiction also.
One specific type of fiction we know Lovecraft read in great quantities was the work contained in the early Munsey magazines. It is a point of debate whether the various magazines founded by Frank A. Munsey are or are not to be considered pulp magazines; for our purposes it will suffice to say that they were significant forerunners of the pulp magazines and form a natural chain of continuity in popular magazine fiction from the dime and nickel novels of the later nineteenth century to the genuine pulps of the 1920s. As avid a dime novel reader as Lovecraft appears to have been, it is in no way surprising that he would ultimately find the Munsey magazines a compelling if guilty pleasure. What he did not know at the time was that they would radically transform his life and his career—largely, but not uniformly, for the better.
Lovecraft mentions an article in a Munsey magazine in one of his hectographed magazines in 1903. Whether he read them continuously from this point on his unclear; but there is no gainsaying his remark in the following letter to the All-Story Weekly for 7 March 1914:
Having read every number of your magazine since its beginning in January, 1905, I feel in some measure privileged to write a few words of approbation and criticism concerning its contents.
In the present age of vulgar taste and sordid realism it is a relief to peruse a publication such as The All-Story, which has ever been and still remains under the influence of the imaginative school of Poe and Verne.
The All-Story was a companion magazine to the Argosy, which Munsey had changed to an all-fiction magazine in October 1896. Lovecraft of course read the Argosy also, as we shall presently see, although perhaps not this early. Lovecraft in 1916 states a little sheepishly that ‘In 1913 I had formed the reprehensible habit of picking up cheap magazines like The Argosy to divert my mind from the tedium of reality’,31 but it is now evident that this is, at the very least, an equivocation as far as the All-Story is concerned. One further bit of evidence is the fact that full-page advertisements for the International Correspondence Schools regularly appear in the Argosy, and it is very likely from this source that Lovecraft learned of this organization and used its services around 1909. He also read the Popular Magazine (Street & Smith’s rival to the Argosy) about the period 1905–10.