There is one further bit of evidence that seems to clinch the matter of a romance between Lovecraft and Jackson. Lovecraft’s wife Sonia Davis told R. Alain Everts in 1967 that ‘I stole HPL away from Winifred Jackson’.7 How this happened will be the subject of a later chapter; but this romance, if it could really be called that, appears to have been very languidly pursued on both sides. There is no evidence that Jackson ever came to Providence to visit Lovecraft, as Sonia frequently did even though she lived much farther away (Brooklyn), and after Sonia ‘stole’ him we hear little of Winifred either from Lovecraft or in the amateur press generally.
Meanwhile Lovecraft was not done travelling. Two more trips to Boston were made in the early months of 1921, both again for amateur conventions. On 22 February the Boston Conference of Amateur Journalists was held at Quincy House. In the afternoon session Lovecraft delivered a paper, written the previous day, on a prescribed subject, ‘What Amateurdom and I Have Done for Each Other’. Later Lovecraft engaged in various discussion—mostly with W. Paul Cook and George Julian Houtain—but declined an invitation to sing, even though he had apparently done so at the September 1920 gathering. So Lovecraft’s days as a plaintive tenor were not wholly over!
A month later Lovecraft returned to Boston for a St Patrick’s Day gathering of amateurs on 10 March. This took place at 20 Webster Street. Members were seated in a circle in the parlour, and literary contributions were recited in sequence. Lovecraft on this occasion read the story ‘The Moon-Bog’, written expressly for the occasion; it received abundant applause, but did not win the prize.
Lovecraft was planning yet another trip in early June, this time to New Hampshire to visit Myrta Alice Little in Hampstead, near Westville (just over the Massachusetts border, a few miles north of Haverhill). But Lovecraft’s one surviving letter to Little, written on 17 May 1921, in which he outlined the plans for the trip, was written only a week before the most traumatic event of his entire life up to this point: the death of his mother on 24 May. In ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ Lovecraft suggests that the immediate postwar period led to the solidification of his philosophical thought:
The Peace Conference, Friedrich Nietzsche, Samuel Butler (the modern), H. L. Mencken, and other influences have perfected my cynicism; a quality which grows more intense as the advent of middle life removes the blind prejudice whereby youth clings to the vapid ‘all’s right with the world’ hallucination from sheer force of desire to have it so. These ‘influences’ are certainly a heterogeneous lot, and they seem primarily influential in Lovecraft’s ethical, political, and social philosophy. What he does not state here are what appear to be the two central influences on his metaphysical thought of the time— Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1899; English translation 1900) and Hugh Elliot’s Modern Science and Materialism (1919).
When Lovecraft stated his philosophy as ‘mechanistic materialism’, he was intent on denying certain key tenets of idealistic or religious philosophy; specifically, that any event can occur in the universe beyond the bounds of natural law (although all natural laws may not currently be known, or may never be known); that any ‘immaterial’ substance (such as the ‘soul’) can exist; and that the universe as a whole is progressing toward any particular goal. The denial of God, the soul, and an afterlife is implicit in all these formulations.
Mechanistic materialism as a philosophy, of course, goes back to the Presocratics, specifically Leucippus and Democritus, the cofounders of atomism and very strong proponents of determinism. Among modern thinkers materialism made considerable headway in the seventeenth (Hobbes), eighteenth (Helvétius, La Mettrie, d’Holbach), and nineteenth centuries, in part through the rediscovery of the ancient materialists and much more importantly through increasing advances in science. Indeed, Lovecraft’s chief philosophical influences are all from the nineteenth century— Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, and others who by their pioneering work in biology, chemistry, and physics systematically brought more and more phenomena under the realm of the known and the natural.
One of the greatest weapons Lovecraft found in his battle against religious metaphysics was anthropology. The anthropological thought of the later nineteenth century had, in Lovecraft’s mind, so convincingly accounted for the natural origin of religious belief that no further explanation was required for its tenacious hold on human beings. This conception is discussed at length in the essay ‘Idealism and Materialism—A Reflection’, which was published in an issue of the National Amateur dated July 1919. The notion that primitive human beings were, to put it crudely, merely bad philosophers who misapprehended the true nature of phenomena was evolved by a number of important anthropologists of the later nineteenth century. I would like to believe that Lovecraft read Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), a landmark work in its field that is still of value, but can find no evidence that he ever did so. We are on more certain ground if we contend that Lovecraft’s anthropology of religion comes from John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers (1872) and Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890f.), which he clearly did read (although Frazer perhaps not this early). Fiske’s book was in his library. Like Haeckel, John Fiske (1842–1901) has suffered somewhat of a decline in esteem, but in his day he was highly noted as an anthropologist, philosopher, and (in his later years) historian.
I want at last to address certain curious statements made in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’, wherein Lovecraft attests to his ‘cynical materialism’ and his ‘pessimistic cosmic views’, for they will provide a transition to a study of Lovecraft’s early ethics. Why cynical? why pessimistic? What is there in materialism or cosmicism that could lead to such an ethical stance? Well, as a matter of pure logic, nothing: materialism and cosmicism, as metaphysical principles, have no direct ethical corollaries, and it therefore becomes our task to ascertain how and why Lovecraft felt that they did. Let us consider some statements of the 1919–20 period:
There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth.8 The secret of true contentment … lies in the achievement of a cosmical point of view.9
Once again it must be emphasized that neither of these ethical precepts is a direct corollary of cosmicism; they are, rather, varying psychological responses to Lovecraft’s awareness of the cosmic insignificance of humanity in a boundless universe.
A passage in a letter of 1920 is one of his most poignant early ethical remarks, and here he explicitly ties Epicureanism, Schopenhauerianism, and cosmicism into a neat (if not logically defensible) whole:
About the time I joined the United I was none too fond of existence. I was 23 years of age, and realised that my infirmities would withhold me from success in the world at large. Feeling like a cipher, I felt I might as well be erased. But later I realised that even success is empty. Failure though I be, I shall reach a level with the greatest—and the smallest—in the damp earth or on the final pyre. And I saw that in the interim trivialities are not to be despised. Success is a relative thing—and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavius at Actium when measured by the scale of cosmic infinity. So I turned to observe other mediocre and handicapped persons about me, and found pleasure in increasing the happiness of those who could be helped by such encouraging words or critical services as I am capable of furnishing. That I have been able to cheer here and there an aged man, an infirm old lady, a dull youth, or a person deprived by circumstances of education, affords to me a sense of being not altogether useless, which almost forms a substitute for the real success I shall never know. What matter if none hear of my labours, or if those labours touch only the afflicted and mediocre? Surely it is well that the happiness of the unfortunate be made as great as possible; and he who is kind, helpful, and patient with his fellow-sufferers, adds as truly to the world’s combined fund of tranquillity as he who, with greater endowments, promotes the birth of empires, or advances the knowledge of civilisation and mankind.10