Weird Island

58. WRITERS: H.P. Lovecraft

Episode Summary

So, you’ve seen his face on t-shirts and posters and on the covers of anthology books all over Providence, but who exactly is H. P. Lovecraft? Tune in to the first episode of Season 2 to find out! I cover a number of Providence locations in this episode, and you’re welcome to visit them while listening. Many are pretty close to one another. Here’s my recommended mini tour: Lovecraft’s Birthplace Memorial (home demolished): 454 Angell Street, Providence, RI Lovecraft’s 2nd Home: 598 Angell Street, Providence, RI St. John’s Churchyard: 271 N. Main Street, Providence, RI Lovecraft’s 3rd Home: 10 Barnes Street, Providence, RI Lovecraft’s Final Home: 65 Prospect Street Lovecraft’s Grave: Swan Point Cemetery

Episode Notes

Lovecraft’s Birthplace Memorial (home demolished): 454 Angell Street, Providence, RI
Lovecraft’s 2nd Home: 598 Angell Street, Providence, RI
St. John’s Churchyard: 271 N. Main Street, Providence, RI
Lovecraft’s 3rd Home: 10 Barnes Street, Providence, RI
Lovecraft’s Final Home: 65 Prospect Street
Lovecraft’s Grave: Swan Point Cemetery

Episode Source Material

Episode Transcription

“I never can be tied to raw, new things, For I first saw the light in an old town, Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down, To a quaint harbour rich with visionings. Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams, Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes, And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes - These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.”
You might recognize the city in this passage as Providence, which is an old city, filled with rich history and beautiful buildings. And there are stories hidden everywhere, if you dig just a little bit to find them. But what if the peaceful, antique charm only masks a more horrific true reality? What if there are dark secrets? Terrifying creatures? Alien entities? Things so unsettling that if you saw past the ordinary to discover their existence, you would certainly go mad?
Well, if you’ve read anything by H. P. Lovecraft, you might just think that’s the case. Lovecraft is known for his stories of weird fiction, science fiction and horror which have had a significant impact on the genres today. And the writer happens to have lived most of his life and written most of his stories right here in little Rhode Island.
I’m Sara you’re listening to Weird Island. And I’m back from my summer break! Just in time to celebrate H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday and the return of Necronomicon - which, if you’re not familiar, is an international festival of weird fiction, art and academia inspired by Lovecraft that is happening this weekend in Providence. Actually there’s a lot of good Rhode Island stuff happening this month, including the Rhode Island Statewide Scavenger Hunt which starts on August 27 and lasts that whole weekend. I can’t think of a better way to get out and explore the state than this massive scavenger hunt. There are tons of locations, puzzles, prizes, treasure chests - and audio clues from this podcast. I’ll be there and I highly highly recommend you form a team and join! It’s gonna be a great time. Okay, so that’s my plug. Now, let’s learn about Lovecraft, the man so entangled with the city where he spent most of his life that his headstone reads, “I am Providence.”
H. P. Lovecraft may be one of the most iconic writers to come out of the state, and you’ll find evidence of his presence all over. There’s a Lovecraft store, a Lovecraft convention, people come from all over to visit his grave. Millions of copies of his stories and novellas have been printed and sold all over the world, games and TV shows have been based on his work, there are shirts with his long, gaunt recognizable face on them, and all kinds of products made of his most famous creation, the god-creature Cthulhu. Or Cthulhu. Or Cthulhu - however you want to pronounce it. Lovecraft would have aligned most closely with the last one, though I’m going to keep saying Cthulhu.
Some of the most prominent writers in the horror and fantasy genres cite Lovecraft as a major influence, including Stephen King, Robert Bloch, Alan Moore, and George R. R. Martin. Cthulhu even inspired the icon for this show. So whether you know it or not, you’ve read or seen something inspired by Lovecraft’s work.
Which is kind of funny, because Lovecraft was not very well known during his lifetime. He wrote hundreds of poems and essays, roughly 70 stories of fiction, and–get ready for this one–80 Thousand Letters, making him one of the most prolific letter writers in human history. But most of his published work appeared in pulp magazines and was not considered mainstream literature. He only had one, unsuccessful, published paperback book during his life. And yet, we continue to celebrate Lovecraft today.
I’m going to tell you why that is in a bit, but first, I wanted to share a little bit about Lovecraft himself through the lens of the places in Providence where he lived and spent his time. Lovecraft spent almost his entire life in the College Hill area, and he was shaped by the city. He was a big walker–he wandered and learned little historical details, and loved showing off that history. He would take visitors on tours around the places he loved, but he also packed his writing full of real details that make his particular brand of horror all the more unsettling, especially if you live around here and can picture the places he references. And he never ran out of places to explore. Even at the end of his life he felt there was more to be discovered.
One of the first places to have a significant impact on Lovecraft was his childhood home, at 454 Angell Street, where he was born in 1890. Lovecraft described the home in a letter, saying that it was “one of the handsomest residences in the city–to me, the handsomest–my own beloved birthplace! This spacious house, raised on a high green terrace, looks down upon grounds which are almost a park, with winding walks, arbours, trees and a delightful fountain.” Today, the house is gone, but a small plaque commemorates its location - right in the middle of busy Wayland Square. Things have changed a bit since Lovecraft’s time, when the house would have been on the very edge of the developed part of Providence.
The home actually belonged to his grandfather on his mother’s side, who was a prominent businessman and aristocrat. And Lovecraft lived there with his grandparents, aunts and mother because he lost his father at a young age. When the writer was just 2, his father suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to Butler Hospital, where he died five years later. Shortly before his father’s death, Lovecraft also lost his grandmother, and these deaths shaped his writing. He remembered his mother and aunts dressing in black mourning clothes that terrified him so much they inspired nightmares in which he was tormented by “black lean, rubbery things with horns, barbed tails, bat-wings and no faces at all.” These “night-gaunts” as he came to call them, would later appear in some of his stories.
Then, when he was about 14, his grandfather also passed away, and this loss may have been the greatest. The man had played an important role in Lovecraft’s life, igniting the writer’s love of literature and antiquity by making up Gothic stories to entertain him and showing him artifacts from Rome. But his death also meant that Lovecraft had to leave the childhood home he loved so much and move into the second Providence location that would shape his life. The family’s estate had been mismanaged, so Lovecraft and his mother were no longer able to afford to live in the stately family home. Instead, they were forced to move up the street to what Lovecraft described as a “congested, servantless” duplex at 598 Angell Street that is still standing today.
It was in this home that Lovecraft experienced some of the darkest and most isolated years of his life. He had always been in and out of school during his childhood. He suffered from what he described as a “general nervous weakness” and would often be withdrawn for periods of time due to concerns over his mental health. Despite his sporadic formal education, he was extremely intelligent. He started reading around 3 or 4, wrote his earliest poetry at age 6, and published extensive scientific periodicals about chemistry and astrology beginning as early as age 8. And he respected formal education, hoping to attend Brown University. But, then, he failed to graduate from high school, and the shame and disappointment affected him deeply. He withdrew from the rest of the world for about five years, sequestering himself in the apartment he shared with his mother. During this time, neither Lovecraft or his mother made any money, finances increasingly became a concern, and his mother’s mental state also began to deteriorate. A neighbor remembered that she showed signs of a nervous breakdown, claiming to see “weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark.” And the neighbor also recalled her talking “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.”
His mother would later be committed to Butler Hospital, the same institution where Lovecraft’s father had been, and she died, tragically, due to complications from a gallbladder operation.
Fortunately for Lovecraft, he had been coaxed from his isolation just prior to his mother’s death. How that happened was kind of unusual. During his isolation, he had begun to transition from scientific writing to literature, particularly poetry. And in addition to poetry, he had started to write letters to editors of pulp and weird-fiction magazines criticizing some of their most prominent writers. One of these letters ignited a year-long feud between Lovecraft and a romance writer named Fred Jackson and his supporters. And a head editor of the United Amateur Press Association noticed Lovecraft’s writing and invited him to join the organization as an amateur journalist.
The world of amatuer journalism shaped the next decade of Lovecraft’s life. He began to break out of his isolation, learn social skills and form friendships–though at first these friendships developed primarily through letters. And then he began to dip his toes back into writing fiction.
Many of his stories over the next few years would vary in quality, but they showcase how he worked out his own style, trying on aspects of other writers he admired. Some were strongly reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, who Lovecraft worshiped. Poe had spent some years in Providence, and Lovecraft traced his steps through the Athenaeum and St. John’s Churchyard and Cemetery, where he frequently brought visitors to channel the writer and tap into the “vampiric horror burrowing down there & emitting vague miasmic influences” in the churchyard.
Not only was Lovecraft branching out through correspondence, he slowly started venturing away from home. He visited other writers and attended amateur journalist conventions, and it’s at one of these conventions that he met his future wife, Sonia Greene. They got married in 1924 when Lovecraft was 34 and Greene was 41, and for the first time Lovecraft moved out of Providence to live with his new wife in Brooklyn, New York.
Getting married seemed like a good idea at first. Greene had a steady job and income and could support Lovecraft while he wrote. She could encourage him to live a more active life. And being in New York meant Lovecraft had access to many prominent writers in his genre. But neither marriage nor New York worked out great for Lovecraft.
In a story titled “He,” Lovecraft writes, “My coming to NY had been a mistake, for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twisted endlessly from forgotten courts… I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze and annihilate me.” A big part of that sense of horror had to do with the number of immigrants in New York.
Before leaving Providence, Lovecraft had already expressed some pretty racist ideas. He felt a great deal of fear and hatred towards pretty much anyone and everyone who wasn’t white and English. This stemmed from his attachment to ways of the past and a resistance to social change. Lovecraft saw immigrants as threats to his notion of American culture. So, you can imagine that New York, which is frequently described as a melting pot because of its massive diversity, filled Lovecraft with dread. More than ever, he felt alone in a threatening and hostile world and these feelings made their way into his writing in explicit and implicit ways. Racism continues to be the most troubling part of Lovecraft’s legacy today.
After just two years in the city, Lovecraft returned to Providence–leaving his wife behind. Greene never joined him in Rhode Island, and the two were separated a few years later.
Lovecraft was overjoyed to be back in the city of his childhood, and he moved into the next notable Providence location, a “spacious brown Victorian wooden house” at 10 Barnes Street where he lived with his Aunt Lillian. This house is still standing today, and it’s notably the place where the writer produced some of the most famous works of his career.
The first is arguably his most recognizable work–The Call of Cthulhu. Set in Providence, the story describes an investigation into a cult that worships Cthulhu, a giant octopus/dragon/human inspired creature from space that came to earth millions of years ago and built a stone city that sank to the bottom of the ocean–trapping Cthulhu underwater. Worshippers of Cthulhu claim that when the “stars are right” he will emerge from the water to reclaim control of the earth.
With this story, Lovecraft introduced what would later be called his Cthulhu Mythos, this idea that creatures from the depths of space have come to earth and interacted with humans. Throughout a number of stories, he introduced additional god-like creatures as well as forbidden books that revealed details about these beings and other elements of the Mythos. The most famous book being the Necronomicon.
Another important element of Lovecraft’s mythos is something I’ve hinted at already–location. Lovecraft spent the end of his life exploring New England lovingly, and integrating real places and real history into his stories while also introducing weird elements along the way. And as someone who also loves wandering the streets of Providence, the attention paid to little specific details of the city make his stories feel almost real. Like there might actually be supernatural worlds just barely hidden behind the ordinary. While it’s one of his longer works, I would highly recommend the Case of Charles Dexter Ward for its many Providence neighborhoods and details. Even Lovecraft’s home at 10 Barnes Street has a cameo.
In 1932, Lovecraft’s aunt Lillian, who he had been living with, passed away. Money was tight, so a little under a year later, he moved into another apartment with a different aunt, named Annie. This apartment is today located at 65 Prospect Street, though it used to be beside the John Hay Library and was actually relocated later on.
Lovecraft loved this home. “It was a cozy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed.” He wrote. This house made an appearance in Lovecraft’s last original short story, called The Haunter of the Dark. And that’s where that passage came from.
By this point, Lovecraft’s literary career was reaching its end. He was making very little money and became sensitive to rejections and criticisms, so he wasn’t making a huge effort to sell his stories. And then the writer’s health began to deteriorate. For years, he had complained of bouts of illness, but potentially due to a fear of doctors, or maybe because he didn't have a ton of money, Lovecraft didn’t get examined until it was too late. He learned that the illness he had been suffering from was cancer of the small intestine and passed away only a month later, at the age of 46. He was buried in Swan Point and listed along with his parents on the Phillips family monument.
Shortly before his death, Lovecraft had been able to hold his very own paperback novel in his hands for the first time. Though he had appeared frequently in pulp magazines, Lovecraft only had one published paperback book called The Shadow over Innsmouth. And only 200 copies were bound and sold. Another 200 copies were printed, but never bound. And they were later destroyed when the publisher went out of business.
Lovecraft could have very easily been forgotten. But he wasn’t. Stephen King calls Lovecraft, “the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale,” and says that “more than any other man, Lovecraft opened the way for me as he had done for others before me.” So, what happened to keep his legacy alive?
Well, it might actually have been Lovecraft’s letters and relationships that really made a difference. He was generous with his writing and his time. He mentored other writers, like Robert Bloch, famous for writing Psycho. He introduced friends to one another and encouraged them to help each other succeed. And he opened up his creative worlds to others, creating essentially an open-source fictional universe that anyone was welcome to take part in. Writers could borrow his creatures and ideas in their own writing. By encouraging others to do this, he gave his stories unusual longevity. They spread throughout the horror and weird fiction genre. And in addition, his friends were determined to preserve his stories. Two actually formed a publishing firm called Arkham House with the express purpose of publishing Lovecraft’s work.
Then, as horror fiction rose in popularity in the 1960s and 70s, Lovecraft’s fiction and is ideas were kind of rediscovered both by literary scholars and filmmakers who drew inspiration from his stories. And his legacy has only grown since then.
Here in Providence, there’s an unmistakable connection with Lovecraft. He represents the weird and unusual, something the city is proud to celebrate. So proud that in 1977, fans erected a headstone for Lovecraft, inscribed with the words, “I am Providence,” pulled from one of his many letters. And his grave, which is in Swan Point Cemetery, is a great last stop on our tour of Lovecraft’s Providence. And a great place to ponder his legacy.
I love that the city features heavily in the author’s work. It’s my favorite thing about his writing. But it’s also kind of unsettling to acknowledge that Lovecraft’s feelings about the city were motivated by what he saw as its ties to an old world. While he wrote that America had “lost New York” to immigrants, but he said the “sun shines just as brightly over Providence.” Though Lovecraft grew politically more liberal throughout his life, he never really became less racist. I’m not including any soundbites of his racist ideas here, but if you think I’m exaggerating this part of his legacy, you can check out the internet quiz titled “Hitler or Lovecraft” linked in the show notes. I think the title speaks volumes to the ideas he expressed. This part of his legacy is definitely something we don’t want to celebrate. But it’s also something that shouldn’t be ignored, either.
Horror fiction expert Leslie Klinger wrote Lovecraft “despised people who weren’t White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But that powers the stories… this sense that he’s alone, that he’s surrounded by enemies and everything is hostile to him. And I think you take away that part of his character, it might make him a much nicer person, but it would destroy the stories.”
Today, creatives are acknowledging the most challenging elements of Lovecraft’s writing and turning his legacy on its head by continuing the tradition of using Lovecraft's characters and themes in their own writing, but introducing their own themes and characters that would have made Lovecraft a bit uncomfortable. For example, Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel Lovecraft Country, which has now been made into a show, follows the journey of three characters as they encounter racist terrors of white America and terrifying monsters ripped from Lovecraft’s worlds. And I love that writers are expanding Lovecraft’s open source universe–which contributed to his longevity as a writer–to address, head on, the racism at its core.
So, yeah, I’ve been avoiding Lovecraft for a while now. And that’s because I found it strange acknowledging that the city of Providence had, in effect, embraced such a complicated mascot. But, then, isn’t Providence complicated too? Aren’t there things to be proud of and things we’d rather not admit about the city’s past? In many ways, the Providence of today is and isn’t Lovecraft’s Providence. The city is full of beautiful old buildings but also beautiful new ideas and diverse people shaping its future. As well as new minds who can take the worlds and creatures born in Lovecraft’s imagination and infuse them with the ideas and new life.
I really wanted to say a huge huge thank you for being here and listening to the podcast. It’s a joy to be back making episodes. But it’s also been like relearning to ride a bike. I remember how to do it, but I’m kind of wobby and all over the road. So I’m going to ease back into this sort of unofficial Season 2 by releasing new episodes every other week with relistens of some of my all time favorites on the off weeks. See you next time as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island.