It is difficult to characterise the non-Dunsanian stories of this period. Lovecraft was still experimenting in different tones, styles, moods, and themes in an effort to find out what might work the best. Perhaps the fact that so many of these tales were inspired by dreams is the most important thing about them. Lovecraft’s letters of 1920 are full of accounts of incredibly bizarre dreams, some of which served as the nuclei for tales written years later. It would be a facile and inexpert psychoanalysis to maintain that Lovecraft’s worries over Susie’s health were the principal cause of these disturbances in his subconscious; as a matter of fact, it appears that Susie’s health had, after a fashion, stabilized and that there was no suspicion of any impending collapse until only a few days before her death. Suffice it to say that the dozen or more stories Lovecraft wrote in 1920—more than he wrote in any other year of his life— point to a definitive shift in his aesthetic horizons. Lovecraft still did not know it yet, but he had come upon his life-work.
CHAPTER NINE
The High Tide of My Life (1921–22)
Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft died on 24 May 1921, at Butler Hospital. Her death, however, was not a result of her nervous breakdown but rather of a gall bladder operation from which she did not recover. Winfield Townley Scott, who had access to Susie’s now destroyed medical records, tells the story laconically: ‘She underwent a gall-bladder operation which was thought to be successful. Five days later her nurse noted that the patient expressed a wish to die because “I will only live to suffer.” She died the next day.’1
Lovecraft’s reaction was pretty much what one might expect: ‘The death of my mother on May 24 gave me an extreme nervous shock, and I find concentration and continuous endeavour quite impossible … I cannot sleep much, or labour with any particular spirit or success.’2 Later on in this letter, written nine days after the event, Lovecraft adds disturbingly:
For my part, I do not think I shall wait for a natural death; since there is no longer any particular reason why I should exist. During my mother’s life-time I was aware that voluntary euthanasia on my part would cause her distress, but it is now possible for me to regulate the term of my existence with the assurance that my end would cause no one more than a passing annoyance. Evidently his aunts did not figure much in this equation. But it was a passing phase, as we shall shortly see.
What, in the end, are we to make of Lovecraft’s relations with his mother? Susie Lovecraft has not fared well at the hands of Lovecraft’s biographers, and her flaws are readily discernible: she was overly possessive, clearly neurotic, failed (as Lovecraft himself and the rest of his family did) to foresee the need for training her son in some sort of remunerative occupation, and psychologically damaged Lovecraft at least to the point of declaring him physically hideous and perhaps in other ways that are now irrecoverable.
But the verdict on Susie should not be entirely negative. Kenneth W. Faig, Jr, correctly remarks: ‘Lovecraft’s finely honed aesthetic sensibilities and seasoned artistic judgment undoubtedly owed something to the early influence of his mother … The wonderful home which Susie and her young son shared with her parents and sisters at 454 Angell Street during the 1890s must have been truly a delight.’3 Her indulging Lovecraft in many of his early whims—the Arabian Nights, chemistry, astronomy—may seem excessive, but it allowed him fully to develop these intellectual and aesthetic interests, and so to lay the groundwork for both the intellect and the creativity he displayed in later years.
The critical issue is whether Lovecraft knew and acknowledged— at least to himself—the ways in which his mother affected him, both positively and adversely. In letters both early and late he speaks of her with nothing but praise and respect. In many letters of the 1930s, when recalling his early years, he makes statements such as: ‘My health improved vastly and rapidly, though without any ascertainable cause, about 1920–21’;4 which gives—or appears to give—not the slightest hint that Susie’s death might actually have been a liberating factor of some kind. But was Lovecraft really so lacking in self-awareness on this issue? I have already cited Sonia’s noting that Lovecraft once admitted to her that Susie’s influence upon him had been ‘devastating’. Another very interesting piece of evidence comes not from a letter or an essay, or from a memoir by a friend, but from a story.
‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ (1933) tells the tale of Edward Derby, who was an only child and ‘had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children.’ A little later the narrator remarks: ‘Edward’s mother died when he was thirty-four, and for months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage.’ That last sentence is all the evidence we need: it makes it abundantly clear that Lovecraft knew (by 1933, at any rate) that Susie’s death had in a sense made the rest of his own life possible. It is telling that, in his litany of ‘near-breakdowns’ beginning in 1898, he lists no breakdown of 1921.
In the short term Lovecraft did the most sensible thing he could have done: continue the normal course of his existence. He may not, like Derby, have travelled to Europe, but there was always New Hampshire. He went ahead with his visit to Myrta Alice Little on 8–9 June, also seeing ‘Tryout’ Smith in Haverhill. He repeated the trip in August. Later that month he went with his old school chum Harold Munroe to their old clubhouse in Rehoboth (which Lovecraft was delighted to find nearly intact), and still later he took in another amateur meeting in Boston.
Meanwhile events in the amateur world were heating up. Lovecraft had easily been elected Official Editor for the 1920–21 and 1921–22 terms, and his ‘literary’ faction was in both political and editorial control of the association: Alfred Galpin was President in 1920–21 (serving, anomalously, also as Chairman of the Department of Public Criticism), and Ida C. Haughton of Columbus, Ohio, was President in 1921–22; other associates of Lovecraft such as Paul J. Campbell, Frank Belknap Long, and Alice Hamlet all held official positions.
But the picture was by no means rosy. Lovecraft had considerable disagreements with President Haughton, and years later he claimed that she ‘ran the very gamut of abuse & positive insult— culminating even in an aspersion on my stewardship of the United funds!’5 In response, Lovecraft wrote ‘Medusa: A Portrait’ in late 1921. This is the most vicious and unrestrained of his poetic satires, and in it he mercilessly flays Haughton for her large bulk and her supposed foulness of temper. The poem was published in the Tryout for December 1921.
There was trouble on other fronts also. In the Woodbee for January 1922 Fritter continued his attacks on Lovecraft and his literary coterie. Although Lovecraft responded tartly in his ‘Editorial’ in the January 1922 United Amateur, in this case he was not to prevail. In the UAPA election in July 1922, the ‘literature’ side lost out to its opponents. Lovecraft himself lost to Fritter for Official Editor by a vote of 44 to 29. It was, no doubt, a staggering blow, and may have gone a long way in showing Lovecraft that this phase of his amateur career was coming to an end.
But Lovecraft had the last laugh. The new official board did manage to produce six issues of the United Amateur, but at the convention in late July 1923 Lovecraft’s literary party was almost entirely voted back into office; incredibly, Sonia H. Greene was elected President even though she had not knowingly placed herself on the ballot. This whole turn of events appeared to rile Fritter and his colleagues, and they acted in an obstructionist manner toward the new official board; the Secretary-Treasurer, Alma B. Sanger, withheld funds and failed to answer letters, so that no United Amateur could be printed until May 1924. No convention was held in 1924, and evidently the official board for that year was re-elected by a mail vote; but that administration produced only one more issue (July 1925)—an issue remarkable for its complete dominance by members of Lovecraft’s literary circle (Frank Belknap Long, Samuel Loveman, Clark Ashton Smith, and of course Lovecraft himself). This ended Lovecraft’s official involvement with the UAPA. Although he strove valiantly to establish the next official board (Edgar J. Davis as President, Victor E. Bacon as Official Editor), it never really took off and, after one or two skimpy issues of the United Amateur, it died some time in 1926.